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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   21611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes

"Shy Tory" effect? If indicating you are thinking of voting "no" gets you tagged as a racist white supremacist hater -phobe -ist, then why on earth would you admit to any pollster your true intentions? I think it also indicates we should be sceptical about polls that are all "X is a sure result" for whatever side, because it does depend where you are polling, who you are polling, and how the questions are phrased.

Nah, more likely just small subgroup samples. Tasmania only has 500k people, it's normal for polling to be unreliable. You have to poll a lot of people to get enough Tasmanians to get a reliable subsample.

What is the pollster going to do to you?

How confident are you the pollster isn't compiling a list of political enemies? What do you gain by answering honestly? If the answer to the first question is "less than 100%" and the answer to the second is "Nothing," why would you ever answer honestly? It just seems like the obviously wrong decision (for non-Kantians, at least.)

I've never heard of someone in the US pretending to be a pollster to create a list of potential enemies, so I'd be basically 100% sure.

This same argument would cause you to expect a shy progressive effect that doesn't seem to exist.

Modern Western society does a lot more cancellation, hecklings and punishment of the insufficiently-left than the insufficiently-Right

As long as the chance is not zero, the argument says you must lie.

What's more important - that you answer a poll honestly or that someone likes you? In this world of anxiety and influencers it doesn't matter who the pollster is, only that they exist and might think less of you.

Is there less of a shy tory effect in online surveys where there isn't even anyone on the line who might judge you?

I dunno man,I have tended to give the answers the surveyors wanted to hear whenever I've been picked for one. Though these were over the phone, not online.

It's just a bit awkward and easier to tell them what (you think) they want

Don't think it's shy-Tory. The No result was stronger than the polls in most states, but it's not stronger than the trendline of the polls (the polls showed Yes collapsing over time, so it's not surprising that Yes continued to collapse between the last polls and voting day). And the very last polls in Tas do show a sudden and massive shift to No, fairly consistent with the actual outcome. Maybe something happened in Tasmania that I don't know about.

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