live in a world with
more and more information
less and less meaning
In his opinion piece on the upcoming elections in Great Britain, I’ve seen all the ‘landslide’ polls – but they can’t tell us what’s really going on in this election, Mr. John Harris writes about political polls and polling, saying:
” ... So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.
Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called – and yes, I had to look this up – multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.
The result is postmodern news that a certain kind of 20th-century social theorist would have loved. The Conservatives, the Telegraph screamed last week, are on track to “slump to just 53 seats”. The Labour party, it said, was predicted to win a mind-boggling 516. Here, it seemed, was full-blown Starmergeddon, and the advent of a one-party state. But no one had voted and nothing had actually happened. Nor, by definition, could anyone be certain that the predictions were in any way accurate. “‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning,” said Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 masterpiece Simulacra and Simulation. In this election, that distinction hardly seems to matter.
Let us boil that down.
Multilevel regression with poststratification surveys, based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency has given it [polling] an air of quasi-scientific magic.
I like that.
Who knows what questions were asked and how they were asked and in what order where they asked.
Tell me what you want to hear and I will design a poll that produces results that back it up.
Mr. Harris closes his article with, “We should treat all those polls with deep scepticism; the best thing, in fact, may be to marvel at their arcane machinations, occasionally recognise their prescience, and laugh.”
I would laugh long and hard if polls in America didn’t make me want to cry long and hard.
But here is what I find so interesting.
When his wife lost the election in 2016, former President Bill Clinton mused that it was just like Brexit.
Unexpected.
The Brits went went did something totally stupid and did it in a totally stupid way.
Now it looks like the British electorate is trying to set things right.
Who am I to doubt.
The polls all say so.
No Haiku For You 