Horrible voter outreach.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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It pollutes the senders data set because its entirely fallacious to assume that the only reason why some one would choose not to assert their opinion is only because they hold a specific opinion. The resulting data would be inherently skewed towards a particular result.
Imagine you are taking orders for lunch for an office of coworkers and you were just told people that you are going l to order a hamburger for anyone who doesn't explicitly say they wanted chicken and gave them a limited time to respond. You are very likely going to find some angry coworkers who wanted chicken but were stuck in a meeting. You will likely have a small population of people who realized it was Tuesday and had been really looking forward to tacos. And certainly, the vegetarians in the office are going to try to sabotage you professionally for awhile.
Well, they might be upset, but let’s not put the cart before the horse. Hopefully they don’t jump straight to sabotage and start with a kindly worded email heh.
ok, now i’m starting to pick up what you two were putting down! thanks for de-confusing me a little, let me go back and re-read with that new understanding
Happy to help, sorry rushed a little bit to finish the last reply. Effectively the point the original replier was trying to make is that the data set is polluted with bad data because the collection method is just terrible. So back to the analogy I started setting up earlier. If the goal is to get everyone food, you technically win... Job done... Good job. Food will arrive, some people will get the chicken they specifically requested, and maybe a few people who actually wanted hamburgers will be happy too...
But if the goal is to know what your coworkers actually wanted to eat and get it for them, then the only orders you will certainly get right would be for the people who actually wanted chicken, had the opportunity to reply, and took time out of their day to confirm there order. But you will also have people who maybe aren't that keen on chicken but ordered it because they really didn't want a hamburger.
Everyone else will now get a hamburger... That includes people who actually wanted hamburgers, people who didn't have a preference, people with a preference but it's something other than chicken or hamburgers, people who actually wanted chicken but didn't get their order in on time, people who brought there lunch and planned on eating it instead, people who thought the message you sent was a scam and didn't reply but would have said chicken if they had known it was actually legit, people who told you in person they wanted chicken and didn't realise they still needed to email you, people you sent the email to but were actually on vacation or working from remote that day, etc. All of them, hamburgers... How exciting... LOOK HOW POPULAR HAMBURGERS ARE EVERYONE! I can't believe hamburgers beat chicken! Can you believe that 67.3% of our office is such fans of hamburgers?!
Basically the results of a poll constructed like in the original post would be utterly trash, because the method being used is horseshit and not how any serious poller would/should ever conduct a poll.
As someone who spent some time professionally as a software engineer at a market research company, I can indeed tell you that these results will be utter trash lol.
I totally get what you are saying, now.
These kind of “polls” are just simplistic versions of typical marketing surveys where the sender is trying to get the lay of the land.
In marketing, surveys are usually crafted with quite a lot more care than this.
The software that I got to work on at that company helped with building humane surveys - we had a pretty slick setup where the researchers could craft entire logic trees to handle all the different types of paths that you were listing out.
Professional, Ethical Marketers do 100x better than this utter trash poll.
edit: whoops, apologies if this violates any community rules for being marketing apolgetic, my bad
Beautiful! Yeap that's a very clean parallel and also extremely important in that field as well.
Since this has turned into a lovely exchange I want to offer one more point for your consideration.
Where the outcome of marketing data typically intends to position a product or service in to it's most profitable position, and the quality of the data produced can be somewhat validated by future sales/market share/market depth/etc.
Polls like the one we are discussing aren't constrained in the same manner and may be maliciously and purposefully designed to generate biased data. Humans are inherently vulnerable to hostile psychological manipulations. If this poll specifically isn't just an outright scam intended to get its recipient to click on some link that load a payload of malware, it is certainly designed to purposefully create skewed empirical data.
Not everyone, but certainly a small minority of people who may have not necessarily felt certain about where they stood either direction could look at the results of a poll like this and might find a tinge of doubt in the back of their heads. This sort of tactic hopes that a person will feel a paranoia that everyone else seems to know something significant that they don't and drive social anxieties up. Again, not always, but also not uncommonly, we can find ourself doubting even deeply felt personal resolve on a topic or position if it feels like the vast majority of people disagree with us. This sort of cognitive bias warfare isn't intended to immediately flip a persons perspective, but rather it's designed to soften a persons resolve and introduce enough doubt that they may become susceptible to being flipped later. It's why we need to embrace healthy skepticism and be willing to be more stoic with how we consume numbers others prepped for us.
Much love friend, have a great day/evening!
it’s almost like they have to use dark patterns because they don’t have anything actually relevant to offer?
I take it that you operate in the political field, professionally?
Love your enthusiasm and kindness, thank you friend! Much love and back atcha
Your post just made my day :D
It’s past time for me to hop off lemmy for the day, but I have some further thoughts percolating in regard to the rest of your post. Maybe expect a further reply in the near future!