Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers 546
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster. "For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
To be fair... (Score:3, Informative)
It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
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Financially or intellectually bankrupt?
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
First one, then the other.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Interesting)
[quote]or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.[/quote]
I actually liked Rachel Meadow on Air America. Every night she would give the daily death tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan. Something that no other news/talking head program that I have been able to find on my radio dial does. The rest of the line up was pretty 'meh' though.
-Rick
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I wonder if she still does that at the beginning of her program? It seemed that when Bush was in office, the left screamed bloody murder when it came to the war(s). Now that their guy is in office, you can hear chirping from crickets.
She doesn't do that on her tv show on MSNBC, but she goes after Obama all the time on lots of other stuff, as does Keither Olbermann, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. To think that 'the left' doesn't go after Obama for anything is to completely ignore some of the biggest names
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> Obama is not a liberal, as many on the left have discovered to their consternation since the election. ...and as many others on the left knew long before the election.
True, and I knew that, too, but I didn't know he was going to go all 'Bush Lite' on so MANY issues.
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Obama is certainly a liberal.
You're using that word, liberal, but it certainly doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means. If Obama were liberal, he would have signed an executive order halting DADT his first week in office, appointed an Attorney General that would be laying waste to Bushco and Wall Street with indictments, pushed for at least a 70% top marginal tax rate, withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed for single payer, pushed for a real green energy bill....
At this point, it's an open que
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
Olbermann continued to close his show with the number of days since "Mission Accomplished" right up until a month or so ago, when he switched to the number of days since the deepwater horizon leak started. Much of the left does not pull punches against Obama for taking his time extracting us from these debacles.
The far left idealists can get quite heated against Obama. Me, all I have to do is imagine how McCain would have responded, then after I've wiped off all the cold sweat and stopped gritting my teeth, I have no regrets about 08.
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What is "leadership or sense of urgency"?
Should he be down there trying to clean the gulf with his fucking kidneys? Shutting down other drilling was a pretty big step, and anybody who thinks that there is something more that could be done is ignoring the enormous scope of the problem (there are lots of dumb-shit PR things that could be done, but not much that would really do anything about the oil, the biggest problem is that there were not enough resources to deal with it in place before it happened, not t
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What is "leadership or sense of urgency"?
Should he be down there trying to clean the gulf with his fucking kidneys?
I think there are a lot of people who forget that Obama wasn't facing off in the last election against Aquaman, but for the record John McCain wouldn't be using telekinetic powers to summon a posse of dolphins to plug the leak in the gulf either. It's either that or else we've somehow come to think that knee-jerk, blustery statements/actions that don't address the real problem (like the Patriot act or the invasion of Iraq) are a good thing.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you misread the summary? The Daily Kos is not at fault here.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
They explain the criteria by which they selected R2K, and it seemed fine. (RTFA)
That they caught R2K at this, and were willing to expose it, while other polls have also exhibited some of these patterns and continued to be used by their clients, says more good things about dkos than bad.
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Actually, I do. And now They're suing the pants off of R2K. [fivethirtyeight.com]
If this was the National Review Online, or Free Republic, or what have you, there would be a huge push to cover this up and blame the "liberal media"(whatever the hell THAT is) for any accusations that they did something wrong.
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Actually, I do. And now They're suing the pants off of R2K. [fivethirtyeight.com]
If this was the National Review Online, or Free Republic, or what have you, there would be a huge push to cover this up and blame the "liberal media"(whatever the hell THAT is) for any accusations that they did something wrong.
I doubt they would have questioned the results to begin with, much less investigated...
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You need to travel. What passes for centrist in this country, and much of what is called liberal by know-nothings, is considered rather right wing in most of the rest of the western world.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody expects the Daily Kos to be accurate. It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
On matters of fact, they're pretty scrupulous, especially when it comes to owning up to their own mistakes, like hiring R2K.
On matters of opinion and ideology, well, it's a political blog. What exactly is an "accurate" opinion?
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
On matters of opinion and ideology, well, it's a political blog. What exactly is an "accurate" opinion?
"Mine."
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Actually, Rush is pretty accurate. He's just (admittedly) biased. It's the bias that gets you - what he's typically saying is not factually inaccurate.
If he were publishing statistics, on the other hand, the bias would be a problem. Thus the Daily Kos credibility comes into question...
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
Rush is highly factually accurate. That doesn't mean he's right.
He, like many people educated in a day and age where truth is no longer held to the rigorous standards it once was, simply begins his line of thinking with his beliefs, and find the facts that best support those beliefs. Even if that means extracting them from their surrounding context entirely.
But, oh yes, many of the facts he uses are technically true. He's downright wrong on occasion, for sure, the point is that he's not wrong because his facts are wrong, rather, he's wrong because a comprehensive, holistic look at the facts does not influence his opinion at all. They're just a tool to him to propagate his beliefs.
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Insightful)
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And when you look at it from another perspective - you will probably exclude the nerd section of the population who never answers calls from 800-numbers (or other known junk callers) by using technology to divert the calls into a tarpit or something.
At least the open source telephony switch Asterisk do have a blacklist function where blacklisted numbers can be stored and used to perform a response like "The number you have dialed is not in use".
I do run that feature myself - and it's a lot more effective th
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Insightful)
Tin Hat Alert doesn't begin to cover this.
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Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Informative)
The pollster was subscribed to by DailyKos, among hundreds of other news organizations, and the results were skewed IN FAVOR OF RIGHT-WING CAUSES, not left-wing, so the assumption that DailyKos was somehow complicit in this is absolutely not true. (And I've rarely, if ever, read DailyKos, so I have no personal interest in defending them.. the headline is just grossly misleading).
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Informative)
That was Strategic Vision [fivethirtyeight.com], not R2K.
(Hey, I'd be much happier if people named products with distinguishable proper names rather than generic sounding word combinations and worse yet, acronyms, so you have my sympathies for getting them mixed up.)
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who marked the parent troll?
Probably somebody paying attention to Daily Kos' record. You show me the times and places they've been inaccurate. Note I didn't say biased, I said inaccurate. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh make things up, they literally lie on air and in print, so throwing them together with Daily Kos, which at worst selectively covers stories that illustrate its world-view, is a troll-worthy attempt to muddy the waters for the benefit of right-wing hacks at the detriment of honest left-wing news outlets.
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Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Only if you're fond of false equivalencies, or an Obama fanboy. Of which there definitely are some on Dkos..."
Some? Get real. The agenda on DKos is Liberalism, pure and simple. Its says so right on the front page. If you want a politically left view point, then DKos is for you. If want a right, then its Limbaugh. If you want pure news with out a slant... well, I guess you're SOL.
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Uh, there is a HUGE fight ongoing at dkos between the Obamabots and the haters, as they refer to each other. It's hilarious. All the real liberals are pissed as fuck at Obama, because he's a conservative in lib clothing, and we all see that now. But on dkos, we see the equivalent of the Bushtards who approved of the dolt until the end. They can not own up to the fact that they were scammed, and so they will defend Obama to the death even as he bends them over the fence for his corporate masters.
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Right now it seems to be:
- against big government, but for the Patriot Act
- against a Health Care ID card, because that's big brother - but the Arizona "Show us your papers" law? No problem
- for State's rights, unless it's Bush v. Gore, Bush v. California EPA laws, or SCOTUS vs. state gun laws
- against deficits, unless a Republican's in the White House
- against "Islamofascists", unless their Saudis, in which case nothing to see here
- against abortion
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Then by your metric, the Republican party is not conservative. We should think up a new word for them then, how about just 'Wrong'?
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Conservatism is about the protection of individual rights and liberties, freedom.
Abortion.
Drug war.
Pornography.
Patriot Act.
Warrantless wiretapping.
Gulags at Gitmo and Bagram.
"Show your papers" law in Arizona.
You were saying?
The lower class needs healthcare: response is to increase government spending with entitlements
...and force people to buy insurance from the same greedy insurance companies that would just as soon watch you die in the street than pay out claims.
The economy is tanking badly: response is
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Now that teabaggers know what the term means, they call themselves tea partiers. But back in the day, they carried teabags around and called themselves teabaggers.
Here's an article backing up that fact, but I warn you, it is from that den of liberal iniquity, Billy Buckley's The National Review, so take it with the grain of salt that any reading of The National Review requires.
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE= [nationalreview.com]
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, that proves nothing other than some people are as ignorant as yourself. That article was written in December, 2009. And the author apparently didn't know anything about the Tea Parties that had been happening for almost three years - he seems under the (mistaken, or intentionally misleading) assumption it had something to do with Obama's election.
Here's [youtube.com] some insight [latimes.com] from some of the progenitor tea parties.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wrong.
The first big day for this movement was Tax Day, April 15. And organizers had a gimmick. They asked people to send a tea bag to the Oval Office. One of the exhortations was “Tea Bag the Fools in D.C.” A protester was spotted with a sign saying, “Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You.” So, conservatives started it: started with this terminology. But others ran with it and ran with it.
--
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE= [nationalreview.com]
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Well, you just stick to bantering about terminology and calling names while we prepare to slaughter and gut the Big Government incumbents in November. You can camp out on the articles on Wikipedia and spend your time that way, I guess. Enjoy your broken-winged Chicago thug, by the way. He's your albatross for awhile longer. Shoulda picked Hillary, I guess.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
And none of that changes my original point, which was that it is used as a pejorative term to attack people rather than engage in debate, and therefore is usually used by people whose ability to engage in an interesting discussion is less developed than their desire to mock those who think differently.
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Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Whatever the original intent may have been, look at the teaparty.org homepage.
These are not people interested in civil debate of how to implement their principles.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually no. They carried the very signs that started all of this:
http://washingtonindependent.com/69660/correcting-jay-nordlinger [washington...endent.com]
In January of 09, they had a Facebook page that had some back and forth discussion about the 'alternate' meaning of teabag with some surprised disdain when they were informed as to what the term meant. They were apparently unaware at that point.
This is from the rally in DC on April 15th of 2009:
http://washingtonindependent.com/31868/scenes-from-the-new-american-tea-party [washington...endent.com]
One final little tidbit...the debate by conservatives as to whether or not to wear the title with pride ;)
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/to-teabag-or-not-thats-still-the-question-for-conservatives.php [talkingpointsmemo.com]
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fundamental problem with the Tea Party movement is that, the libertarian (economically), interventionist (with regard to foreign policy), and xenophobic (with respect to our relationship with the rest of the civilized) ideas that are underlying their platform are demonstrably awful for any society that adopts them. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong answer, all opinions are not equally valid and worthy of debate - yet we will tolerate all of them. The Tea Party movement is wrong, plain and simple. They do not have a legitimate contribution to make to the debate of how to govern society because their answer to that question is, "Don't."
That's not an ideology, it's an emotional response. It is essentially fear based isolationism taken to the extreme and applying it as far down as it will go; to the individual person. That, mixed with religious zealotry, and a sub-culture that worships guns and violence has the potential to set the US back 50-100 years in terms of social progress, equality, and the expansion of rights (as is understood by the ability to actually make life choices and have the MEANS to carry them out).
We have to tolerate them, as Americans they are within their right to express themselves, but anyone who does not stand up and say, scream, "NO!" to their hateful, backward, intolerant, reactionary rhetoric is the very antithesis of patriotic.
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Taking a quick scan of the teaparty.org home page, they seem to be more anti-Democrat than for anything in particular.
If they were really an organization of principle instead of partisanship they would be trying to push both parties to work with their principles, in particular note their stance on Gen. McChrystal's comments. It doesn't matter whether he was right or wrong, that level of public insubordination is unprofessional and behavior unbecoming an officer in the US military.
That they have an article s
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For the FY2009, the federal budget was approximately 3.1 trillion dollars. Of that, 1.89 (~61%) trillion was mandatory (entitlement) spending - Social Security, Medicare, National Debt service, Unemployment, welfare, and the like. The remaining 1.21 trillion (~39%) was discretionary spending.
Of that 1.21 trillion, about 515 billion (~42%) was spent on the Department of Defense.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget [wikipedia.org]
For FY2010, the planned budget is ~3.55 trillion dollars.
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every Single Health Care Reform Idea is... ... a Republican idea.
You seem to forget that the National health reform model is modeled after the Massachusetts one, instigated by Mitt Romney, a Republican.
The Republican Party is only out for itself. If it's their idea,
Oh fuckit. I'm not writing this for the billionth time. Fuck the GOP, Fuck the Teabaggers, and Fuck you and your fucking short term memory.
--
BMO
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is late but...
The fact is that the "tea party" and those that back it were utterly silent.
They were utterly silent when GWB enacted the PATRIOT Act and people like me are *traitors* for opposing it.
They were utterly silent when GWB suspended Habeas Corpus. Hello?
They are *utterly blind* when a Republican does something that is supposedly against their principles, but when a Democrat adopts a Republican idea, woe be unto him. He's a TRAITOR to the US.
They're just a branch of Republicanism and nothing more.
--
BMO
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:4, Informative)
Did you know the original Teabaggers were protesting the fact that the wealthy British lowered taxes on their own tea below the taxes on the colonial tea?
That's a pretty inaccurate depiction of the Tea Act and why the colonists opposed it. In essence, the British government was protecting it's own favored company (East India Company), in favor of other traders (and smugglers, because tea carried a hefty tax). So actually the colonists favored free trade instead of crony capitalism (or fascism, if you prefer), and when the British government tried to pass laws that provided monopolies for East India, the colonists rebelled.
I think that's a pretty good analogy with motivations of the modern-day Tea Party protesters.
Slightly misleading headline? (Score:4, Informative)
Those who aren't used to phrases used with "political" centric organizations might mistake the title as saying someone who is on Daily Kos' payroll flubbed the numbers, rather than a company working on contract with them.
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Unless Kos is plural, since it's not the name of an ancient person, they'll need to add an apostrophe and an s. "Daily Kos's Pollster Made Up Numbers".
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It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) that you can show possession with simply an apostrophe for singular nouns ending in an 'ess' sound.
The trick is you have to be consistent about it. (You can't start with "Daily Kos' pollster" and later use "Daily Kos's editor".)
It's more of a guideline than a rule to use the succeeding 's.'
However, I will say that leaving the 's' off would likely be a depreciated style if this was a standards documentation.
Polling (Score:3, Informative)
For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
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Give them credit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unlike the many Republican outfits which used partly- or wholly-fabricated polls by Strategic Vision, or the many media outlets which continue to use the horribly flawed Rasmussen polls to create eye-catching headlines, Kos immediately dumped the pollster, did an investigation, owned up to the errors publicly, and is now pursuing legal recourse.
This is exactly how you would expect an honest media organization (if one with a considerable political agenda) to behave. Too bad the mainstream media and those on the other side of the aisle don't seem to want to do the same.
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I'm not Republican, but ... [citation needed] for the Rasmussen reference.
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"Republicans right now are citing our polls more than Democrats because it's in their interest to do so," Scott Rasmussen said. "I would not consider myself a political conservative -- that implies an alignment with Washington politics that I don't think I have." [washington...endent.com]
Can't really argue when it comes from the guy who started the company.
Re:Give them credit. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Give them credit. (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently the situation with Rasmussen is complicated, but this [fivethirtyeight.com] seems to be a fairly decent starting place (that's not just some activist blogger).
You Are Not a Republican (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You Are Not a Republican (Score:5, Insightful)
You're also lazy, and ill informed. You could have spent a fraction of a second (0.15 seconds) with Google to find about 3,860,000 results for the search term "Rasmussen bias" to discover that, yes, in fact, there is some discussion of this point.
I know there is discussion. Even your quote says differences "can emerge from legitimate differences of opinion about how to model the electorate" and FiveThirtyEight has, in the past, noted Rasmussen's surprising accuracy in predicting election outcomes. Your link would not support the GPP's description of "horribly flawed" to Rasmussen -- merely "hmm that's interesting".
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Seriously though, yeah, Google Confirmation Bias is an incredibly fun game to play.
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I googled that for you:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/use-of-likely-voter-model-does-not.html [fivethirtyeight.com]
Re:Give them credit. (Score:5, Insightful)
+1 on this.
If Stephen Glass worked for a conservative rag like the National Review, he wouldn't have been fired, he would've been promoted.
You mean the way that NYT promoted Jayson Blair several times even though his superiors were complaining about his inaccurate stories, until it became public knowledge that he just made things up?
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At which point he was shitcanned. Your point? Whereas Bill Kristol has gotten virtually everything wrong in his entire career, yet still has a job. As do most Iraq-war-supporting pundits.
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Gee (Score:3, Funny)
R2K not alone in this. (Score:5, Informative)
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You're just making those numbers up, aren't you?
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I believe the statistic that you are looking for is 87 [dilbert.com].
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I can't decide whether this is just being funny, or if it's insightful, or interesting. But, I'm pretty sure it's 50% funny, 20% insightful, and 30% interesting. +/- 3%
Re:R2K not alone in this. (Score:4, Funny)
And if Diebold scored it:
24% Funny
10% Insightful
15% Interesting
51% Republican
misleading headline... (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't get that. "Daily Kos Pollster" is the pollster used by the website "Daily Kos". If you read the story, Kos was defrauded by the pollster.
But it doesn't emphasise the pollster was a third party. Replace 'Daily Kos' with 'Fox News' or 'MSNBC' and see how it can be (mis)interpreted.
If you need the DK reference, then 'Pollster for Daily Kos...' is better as it implies more a working relationship rather than part of the organization.
Or they could have just said 'Research 2000 Makes Up Poll Numbers' Don
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Re:misleading headline... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you took your car in to get an oil change and your mechanic mucked it up, are you to blame for the damage?
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What an awful comparison. If you were telling a group of people that your car is in perfect condition, then yes, you are to blame for not verifying the claim.
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And if the mechanic used the wrong type of oil?
Well, I guess I could do that myself. Unless the factory filled the bottle wrong, so I guess I should refine my own car oil?
Where up the chain does it stop being 'my fault'?
Your example is sidestepping the issue of the seemingly trustworthy third party.
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There's a difference between being sold defective product and knowingly selling said defective product. Will Daily Kos likely and deservedly lose some credibility from this? Probably. But to say that they're a culprit is to imply that they were knowingly complicit in the fraud that they are alleging.
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But my point is that there aren't equal numbers. Slashdot has always leaned one way--left. In this one case where a left-wing site is the topic of discussion, the accusation is being made that Slashdot is a conservative site.
By the way, the Kos supporters with mod points are out in full force abusing the -1 Overrated moderation.
the truth is, polling sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
of course this will turn into a "bash the left" and a "bash the right" thread. when ideology isn't the point. polling is the idiocy in question
and the guy who manipulated the numbers is clearly an amateur. the way you do proper poll manipulation is LOAD THE QUESTION. you poll people with a question with the proper turn of phrase to lead them towards the answer you want. then, when you present the answers to the poll, you also cage the results in such a way to lead the audience in the way you want them to interpret the results
polling is fucking joke. all results from the left, or the right, is complete bullshit, and a waste of your time
Re:the truth is, polling sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming the motive was to manipulate the outcome.
Did it not occur to you that maybe the motive was to provide any outcome that would look real enough to get paid, while not doing as much work?
Re:the truth is, polling sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
polling is fucking joke. all results from the left, or the right, is complete bullshit, and a waste of your time
Or, to put it another way, it's absolutely impossible to know what the people want without asking every single one of them.
Genius.
No, wait, sorry, I meant "bullshit". Polling is a tool, and an extremely important one. Can it be done very poorly? Yes, of course, But that needn't necessarily be true. And it's the only option for understanding a population when there's millions and millions of individuals.
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Depends on what you mean by "joke". Using polling data, Nate Silver predicted the 2008 election within less than a half a percent. That's pretty accurate, but it could still be a joke for some definitions of joke.
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Daily Kos wasn't trying to manipulate anything -- notice that they fired R2K once fivethirtyeight's statistics showed them to be least accurate at predicting election results, long before there was any evidence of fraud?
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The British Civil Service under Sir Humphrey Appleby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U [youtube.com]
exactly my point ;-) (Score:2)
false association is the best sort of poll manipulation
for example, if the poll was
"do you believe obama is the antichrist?"
of course this wouldn't poll very high. even those who oppose obama, the vast majority do so for genuine reasons of policy, not out of some demented partisan bloodsport (although unfortunately, the unthinking zombie partisan hordes seem to be on the rise in this country)
but if the poll was
"if obama were the antichrist, should he be impeached?"
and of course, this will poll high. when of
Remember: (Score:3, Informative)
Echos of Cryptonomicon (Score:5, Interesting)
In Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon [wikipedia.org], there's a scene early in the book where the Allies are assembling the personnel for Station X (aka Bletchely Park [bletchleypark.org.uk]). Statistician, turned Nazi codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, points out that his Nazi counterpart Rudy von Hacklheber, would notice something was amiss with the Allied personnel changes based the statistics of people being transfered to Bletchely Park, and then quickly deduce that the Allies are attempting to break the Enigma code. To camouflage the transfers, Waterhouse suggests creating ficticious personnel and have some of them transfered to Bletchely Park as well. However the military can't just make any random fake person, the fictious people must be statisitically drawn from a distribution that when added to distribution of real Bletchely Park personnel, the combined distribution is statistically insignificant [wikipedia.org] (i.e. fail to reject the null hypothesis) than any other large military base.
If Research 2000 did what is suggested, they failed to taint the polls with the right kind of fake data, just like what the novel warned about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When you are attempting to do as little work as possible and still get the million dollars a year kos spends on polls, mocking with the data in such a way that nothing amiss can be detected is rather counter productive: You might as well do the polls right anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone knows that 78.49% of statistics are made up.
And that the other 23% are erroneous.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know, sarcasm, but I just couldn't help think of this:
http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2009/12/fox-news-120-have-opinion-on-climate-research-pic.html [hollywoodreporter.com]
Re:nothing's shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
They did look at it critically. Research 2000 was fired by Daily Kos before anyone noted any impropriety in the figures, simply because the numbers weren't matching up with reality. Shortly after this happened, Grebner, Weissman, and Weissman approached Markos with evidence of deliberate impropriety.
Does Daily Kos have a responsibility to not promote questionable information as truth? Of course, and they've apologized for the situation. But keep in mind that this information is only coming to light because someone with sufficient statistical background took the time to pore over the data. That sort of expertise is hard to come by, which is the reason why smaller media/news outlets contract out to firms like Research 2000 in the first place!
It's only relatively recently that there's been much interest in the science of polling. Before the emergence of aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight or Pollster.com, it was extremely rare that you'd ever see this kind of statistical analysis of polling data. The traditional method of testing a pollster's reliability was simple trial and error over a period of several elections. Really, that's *still* the primary method. If anything, Research 2000 only got scrutinized in this case because of the issues with their accuracy that led to them being dropped in the first place.
For me, it's not really a partisan issue, despite the highly politicized nature of Daily Kos. It has more to do with the size of the media outlet. I would expect a major news organization with dozens or hundreds of employees, like Fox News or MSNBC, to be able to detect problems like these very quickly. A relatively small blog with maybe a dozen part-time employees like Daily Kos, or Red State, or whatever, I'm more willing to give a pass. At least at first: I'd expect Markos to learn his lesson from this and be more proactive in ensuring that it doesn't happen again.