From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Re: More Nilges obfuscation (was:Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court)
Originator: news@ernie.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 15:37:26 GMT

In article <1992Jul22.021817.13966@samba.oit.unc.edu> Chuck.Lavazzi@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Chuck Lavazzi) writes:
>[Details of flawed polls conducted in 1936 and 1948 deleted; while I never
>denied they were flawed, I claimed that the methodology used was primitive and
>is unlikely to be seen in contemporary polls.  Ed says I have the specific
>nature of the flaws wrong]

Chuck, as part of my computing incunabula I have a book on the use of
punched cards in university applications, published by Columbia in the
1930s.  This book advertises itself as "modern" and it decries the use
of pencil and paper methods using precisely the same rhetoric as a
modern day book on technology within the university.  The applications
described are quite surprisingly sophisticated, including one that uses
punched card devices to measure legal performance.  The results
presented "look" more accurate and carefully presented than many of
today's sloppy spreadsheets.

The point?  Your uncritical acceptance of the cutting edge should be
relativised to time.  Hell's bell's, people called themselves "moderns"
in the 17th century.  That something is "contemporary" may be a
disvalue.



>	I did not "steal your facts", Ed.  I don't have the reference handy,

I hope you've learned your lesson and you will check your references in
the future.  Chuck, we all have a responsibility to minimize the number
of explicitly false statements on the net, such as your statement that
the Literary Digest poll was in 1948.  Otherwise the net will become
like Borges' Library of Babel, containing all possible combinations of
letters, including "the true story of your own death", and countless
false accounts.         

>so I'm willing to concede that I had the specifics of what was wrong with
>the '48 claims of a Dewey victory wrong.  It's still irrelevant to your claims
>that contemmporary polling organizations deliberately distort their results
>to benefit Republicans or that their methods are flawed in some fundamental
>way; a claim which you have *yet* to back up with anything other than 
>sarcasm and blatant assertions.

The Literary Digest and Tribune cases, as well as the Upton Sinclair
defeat, have all been adduced in support of my claim.  Today, evidence
is ready to hand in the form of elections that are decided well in
advance by polls, which push the electorate towards the right.  Polls
are still largely conducted by telephone at times when "normal" people
are expected to be home, which eliminates both people without phones
like the Literary Digest poll, AND shift workers (the exhausted factory
workers and computer operators shopping at the 7-11 at midnight.)

There's plenty of evidence.

>>
>	First of all, the major polling organizations today are not "media"
>organizations at all but rather survey research firms such as Louis Harris,
>Gallup, and National Opinion Research Center.  It has ben a while since I
>worked in this area, but I don't recall much of anything that came out of
>NORC as being "secret".  Second, I never claimed polls *were* secret ballots.
>Third, the fact that the principles of inferential statistics are "completely
>unavailable to the citizen" (not accurate, by the way; stistics texts are
>hardly State Secrets) hardly makes them invalid or suspect.  The principles
>of data communications are hardly more accessible.  Does that make them
>suspect?

Your attempted reductio fails, because as data communications gets more
sophisticated, marginal people are disempowered even as other marginal
people are empowered.  You and I are empowered by being able to post to
the net.  Many, many other people are completely   unfamiliar with data
communications and the increasing amount of esoterica makes it harder
and harder for these folks to jump aboard the data train.

Nobody mentions the blindingly obvious fact that data communications and
personal computers requires that the user have a HOME, pretty much.  I
realize that the media image is one of transcendence, as in the recent
Apple promotion featuring a PowerBook user typing away on a ledge.  This
image (reminiscent in its way of transcendent Nazi art of the 1930s)
ignores the friction inherent in getting a PowerBook to such a ledge,
including its additional burden in your pack, battery questions, and so
on.  Oops, I forgot the Kermit disk...
>>
>	I didn't say they should.  That's why it's a Good Thing to report
>confidence intervals.  And yes, Ed, I *know* that statictics can be 
>deliberately misinterpreted, usually by politicians, activists, or others

...including technical geeks like us...

>
>	Let me see if I've got this straight.  It's *not* a conspiracy, it's
>just that all the American media organizations are trying to manipulate
>political debate?  How is this different from a conspiracy?  Or is it just a
>coincidence that they're all supposedly doing the same thing?

If you had spent some time in the business world, you'd see how profit
motives drives companies in patterns which are not conscious, yet are
semipredictable; corporations behave as intelligent systems seeking to
maximize wealth (this, after all, is part of the neoconservative
hymnal.)  The New York Times can talk all it wants about "church/state
separation" of editorial versus advertising.  Yet when was the last time
you saw an explicit anti-smoking article in the NYT, for example?  



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