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No, i'm not dismissing polls entirely as a way of gathering information (anymore than i would dismiss panhandling as a source of income if it came to that) only trying to maintain a healthy skepticism about their reliability and the ostensible "factualness" of their results.
The subjectivity of opinions doesn't render all polling techniques intrinsically fallacious, but it does mean that, since people can be very capricious in their personal viewpoints, what they think at the time they are polled may not necessarily be what they think at the time the results of that poll are broadcast to the larger public.
Now, i'm more inclined to put credulity on things like exit-polls, which survey for just a straightforward "did you do this, or did you do the other thing" report from those polled. There's a lot less room for subjectivity and ambiguity in the data, especially because it's so immediate (you vote, and 3 minutes later someone asks you who you voted for - it's not the same as asking someone who's standing around waiting for a train who theyre going to vote for two weeks from now). Of course your right that some polls are likely to acheive greater degrees of accuracy than others, and some polling entities are more responsible than others - but that just makes the results of polls as we are constantly hearing them reported by the media to be all the more subject to doubt.
Trying to get broad, cummulative, statistical data on the contingent psychiatric states and mental activities of large populations of people is a very risky - and, in all fairness, sometimes futile - endeavor. The results should always be treated with skepticism. YET, a media intent on selling its content to the public is generally loathe to water down a good headline by doubting the creedence of their own statistics. |
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