About 25 years ago, I was a train commuter so I paid attention to the stories of pedestrians struck by trains and remember one case from them of someone who had headphones on and didn’t hear the train coming. (Another one was someone who was wondering when his train was coming, so he stuck his head out to look down the track for it, only to be struck by an oncoming train coming from the other direction.)
It’s why some transit train stations have gone to a sliding door system like elevators use.
And many transit systems now have a screen or display that tells you how long before the next train or bus will arrive, or provide that info in the smartphone app. Because I hated not knowing how long the wait was.
It’s kind of like those right-wingers who register and vote under fake names to prove how easy it is, then are shocked when they get arrested after confessing to crimes on YouTube. Unfortunately I’m not sure what Wedgewood did is illegal, but it should be.
It doesn’t matter if the poll was conducted according to gold-standard methodology! Anyone who looks at a SINGLE poll and “accepts it at face value” is dumb. You need to look at ALL the polls in a race to get a clear idea of what’s going on. That’s the message we need to be drumming into people’s heads, not “you can’t trust the polls!”
This is bullshit. Not YOU, you’re not bullshit, but the fact that anyone who wants to be informed has to do their own meta research by consolidating a variety of data sources into an uber data source from which they can then determine reality… that’s bullshit.
The world shouldn’t be this way. We have a world of information at our fingertips and it’s all crap because the internet is a store when it should be a library.
No, you don’t have to do your own research, any more than you need to make your own vaccines in the kitchen sink. You can just follow Nate Silver or other reliable poll aggregators.
The reason someone might look at this one poll and not others (or this one while discounting the others) is irrelevant. A vote by someone you consider to be dumb is worth exactly the same as the vote you make after spending hours or weeks or months processing all the information you can get your hands on.
With that in mind, I’ll reiterate that if a company knowingly publishes fake poll data, they need to be investigated. If even to dissuade people from doing this in the future.
Or even “ignore the polls and go vote”.
I certainly agree that this could influence the votes of many people, and that would be bad. I’m just saying that we can choose not to be among those people.
I think we’re mostly on the same page here. My point is simply that we can choose not to be among those people, but not everyone will choose that. And for the people that don’t, they’re vote is worth just as much as everyone else’s.
Here’s a blast from the past I dug up from a decade+ old pit thread for adaher. He was discounting single issue voters and I reminded him of much the same thing as I’ve been saying in this thread:
Wow, there’s a name I haven’t missed hearing in a while!
Same.
There have been hit ads here about Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor, should be denied a second term because she wants to clear out the wild horse* herds along the Salt River.
I like horses but I’m not willing to hand the state over to the chief election denier (Andy Biggs) to keep tham.
*Feral, actually, but wild is what they claim.