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GeekNights 061102 - US Midterm Elections
Tonight on GeekNights, we, in the fashion of old newspapers, officially endorse our political picks for the US midterm elections. In the news, we have an interesting poll about gods and a free way to see some hockey.
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Comments
For example, scientists will tell you that they can not be absolutely certain that the big bang theory is indeed accurate. However, those scientists would also tell you that they believe in it.
Sadly, this is what happens when you look at poll numbers hoping to infer a particular result. Your point was well taken, and much of what you said was valid. In this example, however, you let your bias seep through.
The point was that many of these people claim to be Christians or whatever, which comes with a specific belief in a specific deity, yet admit that they don't fully believe in said deity. A great many Jews straight-up don't believe in their god. They go through the rituals and culture for other, secular reasons, but don't actually believe in some omnipotent god. A lot of people with religious motives will include Jews in their statistics, yet in actuality many of them are atheists.
Furthermore, 11 percent believe that there is no god at all, and 16 percent don't know. The highest level of confidence in the existence of a god within the 42 percent was "somewhat certain." Somewhat means "slightly, or of some degree or measure." That does not imply very much faith in a god's existence at all.
The 42 percent of people I talked about did not have substantial or significant belief in the existence of gods. Anyone with a level of confidence higher than "somewhat" was not included in the 42 percent.
Trust me... I understand your point, but I think that you can't compare the two different question equally. Yes... you may compare them using your own opinions, but you can't assume others shared your viewpoint.
I do think that the question as to whether belief in god is declining was interesting - since they stated that the previous poll was identical. It appears, though, that you can't make that conclusion. Anecdotally, it appears to me that religion is doing just fine thanks to the fundamentalist Christian movement. In my area, while the older churches are somewhat stagnant, the newer fundamentalist churches are growing rapidly. But that's just my anecdotal observation.
Even if you decide to count people who are only somewhat believers as faithful, that leaves 27 percent of Americans with a very clear lack of faith, which is still a significant number.
They didn't use the term "absolutely certain" in the course of the study. That was just the term used to group all of the people below a threshold of belief. Anyone with a higher level of faith than "somewhat" was counted as a believer who was "absolutely" certain.
Pew research shows who votes and why. As an interesting side-note, your views on why polls are statistically meaningless were a) correct and b) echoed by Rush Limbaugh almost word for word... a couple of weeks ago. Personally, I was happy to give up annoying calls from pollsters earlier this year when I ditched my landline. Before that, though, I did screw with them and give outrageous answers to questions. Much fun, that.
On Election Day, watch the exit polls. They will be all over the place. Because members of different parties tend to vote at different times of the day, noon exit polls will show Democrats winning everywhere by a landslide. By 7 p.m., those numbers will appear much more balanced. Exit polls are nothing but the trashiest of entertainment. I compare them to the Maury Povich show.
Also, I can't stand it when TV stations start reporting results with 2% of the ballots counted. What numbers could be more meaningless?
On another note, I can't stress how important it is that all Texas residents vote for Kinky Friedman tomorrow!
If I wasn't on jury duty today I would be driving all over the state talking to exit pollsters!
By releasing exit polling data early in the day (when most Democrats vote) it skews the afternoon (Republican) voting.
Releasing exit polling data before the polls are closed can greatly affect the outcome of an election. If you hear, on the way to the polls, that your candidate is behind by 10% you are more likely to say, "fuck it, I'll just go home!"
I can understand using exit polling as a check on the election and to see why certain demographics vote the way they do but... Releasing this data before the polls closed should be considered as trying to influence the election.
So, by lying to the exit pollsters I skew their results as to make them useless.
It used to be that you could show me a statistic and I would accept that number as being true. Now I know better. Polls lie. They are skewed no matter how carefully they are performed, because there are fundamental problems with the mechanics. Worst of all, polls only measure the opinions of the kind of people that are willing to participate in polls. But on a more basic level, it's the Schroedinger's Cat experiment; once you observe something, you have changed it. There is no such thing as a completely objective poll.
What frustrates me is that polls are largely unscientific samplings that are (except for entertainment) unreliable data. When too many unreliable pieces of data are placed in a set, the entire set is discredited. That is why you could have 10 polls, with eight showing the same results, and still I think most people would ignore the majority implications. The dissenting two polls cast too much doubt.
For instance, riddle me this, Batman: Are eggs good for you? How about coffee? How about wine?
Scores of studies provide conflicting results. Because of this, those studies are largely ignored by the public now when they are released. The same goes for polls. There have been too many unreliable entiries in the data set.
Republicans show Republicans winning tonight. Democrats show Democrats winning tonight. Ralph Nader shows Ralph Nader winning tonight, even though he's not running. The information emanating from polls has a terrible track record (if polls were accurate, John Kerry would be president and we'd all be in church on Sunday morning). Moreover, there is simply too much polling data flooding the marketplace of ideas. It's such a heavy bombardment that we tend to just shut it out.
Thus, I fuck with pollsters.