Should public polls be banned?

:smiley:

Certainly!

It’s not that I cannot explain the principle, it’s that I do not feel it is necessary.

It’s not like I’m using my real name or real address already. I think private polls allow for people to troll because they will not be called to task for their answer whereas people will be more likely to give an honest opinion if they know their user ID will be tied to their answer.

Looking at who voted for what in the last ATMB poll was very telling.

Surely, but a poll on “anything besides mustard on a hot dog?”, that should be private. People kill over that issue.

I posit that private polls are as useless as public polls here a the SDMB. They are not statistically representative of the membership, yada yada yada. They are both just for shits and grins. The public poll is actually probably more useful in that it’s an easy way to see which users lean which way, though if you’ve been around here long enough, that knowledge is fairly common anyway.

Why not? You need to support that assertion because the premise of polls in general is to get a large enough sample as to be a statistically valid reflection of the total population. Are you saying that the responses are not numerous enough to be statistically valid?

It’s a self-selected sample from a self-selected group, not likely to be statistically valid for anything.

I’d say public polls are less likely to be answered honestly because posters might feel like they could be called to task for their response.

Anyone who takes the polls here this seriously probably shouldn’t be participating in them.

How exactly is one called to task on a message board?

I’ll defer to Zyanthia, who first posited it.

Telemark starts a thread entitled, “Carnivorousplant is a dumb ass” with the text, “He voted like an idiot in such and such a poll.”

Same way they are in real life. Why would the admonishment being in text form be different?

Hell, you can admonish out of the pit if you focus on the idea and only imply the person.

As for the OP’s question: Why ban something when people can just choose to not vote in them? I’m only for banning things if they are jerkish. Every other rule should flow from that.

I wish you had said it was a hypothetical; I spent three searches trying to find it before it dawned on me that it didn’t actually exist. :smiley:

I didn’t realize that I was so popular.
:dubious:

Sample size isn’t enough to get you a statistically valid reflection of the population. You still have to be drawing your sample from a sampling frame that’s representative of the population.

The classic example is the 1936 poll that predicted a landslide win for Alfred Landon. Since it was a telephone poll, the sampling frame was effectively everyone who had a phone. In 1936, many people didn’t have one, and the people who did were not representative of the population as a whole. They had a very large sample - of a biased subset of the population. Oops.

Understood, but that still doesn’t answer my question as to why THIS sample here is not a valid representation of the total board population.

It’s a self selected sample, for one. To be valid, it would require some sort of random selection to ensure the population is being represented properly. Right now, only those with strong opinions or a strong desire to share their opinions are participating. Anyone who is “meh” on the subject or even someone who doesn’t read ATMB would not be included.

How do you interpret all the votes for “I don’t care”?