Editing Talk:2357: Polls vs the Street

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Love the title text! [[User:Fwacer|Fwacer]] ([[User talk:Fwacer|talk]]) 23:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I Edit Conflicted with someone (2 minutes too late, after quite a bit of typing. If anyone wants to review my attempt, I'm HTML-commenting it in this gap...
<!-- Perhaps being prompted by the nearing of the 2020 US Presidential (and also a vote for a selection of Senatorial seats) on November 3rd, Randall is taking a poke at some attitudes to polling numbefs.

Many pollsters, commentators and party-faithful have been opining upon the eventual results for some time now, with varying degrees of self-certainty and possibly even self-bias. A very common attempt to refute (other) experts is to point out that one's own experience is totally unlike theirs, so obviously ''they'' are wrong.

"The man on the street" (usually Main Street, rather than Wall Street, at least figuratively) is a common epithet for the 'average' voter, reflecting the modal viewpoint of the general public.

Ideally, a national poll should be properly aggregating all the views that will bring about the eventual result. One failing of the equivalent 2016 election analyses (those that turned out 'wrong') was that the mix of polled persons did not properly reflect the eventual voters. And/or too little account was made of the disproportionate influence of the result of certain constituencies. White Hat, here, may be making the mistake of limiting his mix of future voters to just those he meets on an ''actual'' street. It is unlikely that any given street holds a properly representative population. Depending on where this street is, it will probably be heavily biased for one or other candidate or party for many localised reasons. It appears White Hat's chosen street is biased against whichever viewpoint the professional pollsters are predicting. (Noting that different pollsters have their own potential biases, too, intentionally or as a result of their ultimate focus.)

To amplify his personal bias, he questions the apparent information that most of those more officially polled are not where he is. From his viewpoint an overwhelming number of those he talks to on his street are local to there. Of course, the truth is that with so many other streets (lanes, highways, tracks, strips, trails, etc) out there, it is inevitable that he is wrong about this.{{Citation needed}}

He also seems to have a disproportionate number of respondents enjoying "playing in traffic". It is unclear which actual polls his observations disagree with, but clearly they do. What is less clear is whether this is because he is not just "on the street" but on the ''roadway'', thus ending up avoiding talking to those who are keener to walk on the adjacent pedestrian sidewalks and instead mostly getting information about jaywalkers and similar.

Finally, the titletext addresses an inherent bias insofar as participation. A big problem with pollsters is not being able to question those unwilling or unable to be polled, thus missing their possibly important attitudes. His more 'direct' experience seems to suggest that, of those who were happy enough to talk to him, most (but not quite all) ''said'' they were happy enough to talk to him. Just one out of 25 (giving a rough lower limit to his eventual sample size) may have reported that they'd be unlikely to talk to him - while talking to him.-->
...I already knew I'd have to Wikilink some bits, and can see at least one typo. Maybe I'll integrate some into what's there now, myself but probably not tonight. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.241|162.158.158.241]] 00:39, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
:(Self-reply) Looking into it, I must have been editing for a whole hour, actually. Didn't feel like it, but given there wasn't even a transcript when I started (but the BOT had been replaced) I must have been. And I want paying for all the Captcha responses I'm asked for. It seems I'm either being 'a useful idiot' for slavishly helping the Algorithm, or I am far better(/worse?) at identifying traffic lights, crosswalks, motorbikes, traffic and bicycles than "the man on the street" that pre-populated the Captcha knowledgebase thresholds... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.175|162.158.158.175]] 00:54, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
::I swear half of the answers were wrong in the first place. One time I took a capatcha and it misidentified a mailbox as a parking meter and I had to answer wrong on purpose to get through.
:::One that I didn't get a 'by' on (I'm convinced that being correct just gives you another test in order to generate that result with more authority) was a request for "bicycle" that featured a surface-painted bike-lane symhol. I said "skip" as there was no actual bike (like features that clearly look cross-walkish but aren't even on the road, or horizontal). So unless most other people had a more generous/playful citeria, I should have been correct. And I'm a whiz at identifying hydrants (in my mind?) Of all kinds of colours, but I think there must be far too many opposing opinions. (Traffic Lights: Do you just highlight the lit bits? The composite frames upon which all the lights sit? The whole lot including the support poles/cables? And do you choose frames that have a sneaky tiny bit of overlap of your chosen feature, but are otherwise mostly empty? Or exclude squares that have a slice that wouldn't be recognised as such if given in isolation?) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.110|162.158.159.110]] 13:04, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
::::Select everything containing a part you would expect to receive if you ordered it fully assembled from amazon. Full frame, but cables not included. All of the car. All the nuts on the hydrants. All the lines on the crosswalk. Mailbox includes the stick in the ground, but not the wall of the house when mounted on one. If it takes a second glance to tell it isn't what it asked for, then select it anyways. normies don't have time to double check their answer when trying to post their lols on cat videos.
[[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.39|108.162.238.39]] 13:59, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
:::::Well, sounds like what I do with edge-cases (except I do check carefully, so that I'm ''right'', no matter what), but if other people are being sloppy, I'll have to he careful to be sloppy, eh? ;) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.241|162.158.158.241]] 01:10, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
Reminiscent of this beautifully snarkastic tweet. https://twitter.com/DavidLJarman/status/1302719537234599936 [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.173|172.68.189.173]] 03:27, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that it is morally indefensible to tell the truth to pollsters. And also to people doing a Vox Populi. If you believe one party is better for the people in your country,  then you have a moral duty not to sabotage them. But if everyone tells the pollsters honestly that they are definitely going to vote for party X, you could have everyone believing that it's a foregone conclusion that party X will win, so they don't bother to go out in the rain to vote, and party Y gets in - because they thought their party needed their vote. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.24|162.158.38.24]] 21:45, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

In England the word on the Street is most often SLOW (in Wales it's is ARAF SLOW) :-D [[User:RIIW - Ponder it|RIIW - Ponder it]] ([[User talk:RIIW - Ponder it|talk]]) 18:56, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
:Or BUS / BWS STOP [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.173|162.158.154.173]] 09:53, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
::And in some parts of Canada, it's SLOW LENT, even when it's nowhere near Easter.[[User:Jkshapiro|Jkshapiro]] ([[User talk:Jkshapiro|talk]]) 01:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)