• Shirasho@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        Opt-in polling is so bad. It means you only get answers from people with strong opinions. They are polls where the results are shaped like a U instead of a bell curve so it rarely represents the actual 95 percentile.

      • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think it’s opt-in in that way though. They have a pre-existing list of millions of pre-screened people and they’re selecting a representative sample from that list. Fivethirtyeight ranks them fairly highly among other polls – certainly high enough for this opinion poll to be considered accurate.

        • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Fivethirtyeight only grades them on their ability to predict american election results. I don’t think that’s the same as advocating for their efficacy in producing leading public opinion polls.

          • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You’re right, kinda. Issue polling is generally better than horse race polling and YouGov is no exception.

            • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s a serious issue when there’s a clear political bias in the founders. They put more effort into steering the narrative than objectively reporting it.

                • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  If you haven’t seen any clear bias then you probably have a close enough outlook to them to not notice. And that’s fine, I don’t require everyone to have the same opinion as me for their comments to have value.

                  My impression of bias is probably born out of the leading polls that rightwing media and thinktanks in the UK commission them to do. You can fairly argue that these polls are externally commissioned so their tenor is a product of their issuer not yougov. But the overall impression I got was that they could be readily depended on to produce misleading propaganda against labour when it wasn’t being run by corporate technocrats.

          • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            That’s probably just a problem with polls though – people who won’t answer aren’t included. But they’re saying that 26-32% of Americans are “unsure,” and that sounds pretty lukewarm. Their methodology does sound odd to me too but if it was flawed it would show in the election data, right? Elections are a brutal testing ground. Hundreds of surveys have been predictive and high quality on average.

    • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I wonder how many people in that poll could locate Gaza on a map with no names.

        • gregorum@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          “Indy, your father had the book. That’s why the Nazis were after him. But they never found the book! The book that contained The Map With No Names!”

          “That’s what he sent to me, Ilsa— he sent me the book!”

          [digs package out of pocket]

      • orclev@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I couldn’t, but I also couldn’t find Israel… or Greece… or Idaho… I’m just really bad at geography in general.