And you thought statistics were boring. Well, to be fair, they usually are. Just...not today.
For those who can remember the distant past of 2008, you may remember that major liberal website Daily Kos hired the polling firm Research 2000 to conduct polling on the Presidential race. Afterwards, Kos kept R2K on to conduct a regular polling on the nation, releasing all the information to the public. Everything sounds great, right?
Well, it was, up till earlier this month. The first kicker was when statistics god Nate Silver releases
a survey of pollsters that puts R2K at the bottom of the heap:
Needless to say, this doesn't look good for either R2K or Kos, and the latter decides to fire the former. But, it gets better, as Kos himself has now alleged that
the R2K polls conducted for the past year and a half were complete and utter bunk. And needless to say, Markos is rather...perturbed at the situation, and
has promised that the next people that R2K hears from will be the DKos legal team.
This one comes out of left field, pardon the bad pun. I don't think anyone expected that R2K was that scummy.
Edit: DKos lawyer
details the legal case to the WaPo.
Edit 2:
R2K launches the C&D brigade.
Posts
Although some of their more famous ones (like the old "28% of Republicans think Obama wasn't born in the US") are apparently roughly backed up by other, more reputable agencies.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/06/daily-kos-renounces-pollster-t-1.html?hpid=news-col-blog
It will be interesting to see the Zogby poll that Fox News presents when discussing this.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
"Baseless" claims and their pages of explanation and reams of data they were drawn from, "BASELESS!"
I bet they're still pissed.
lol
Of course, it could do both.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
What? How is this in any way an indictment of markets? Kos picked poorly from amongst the available options and apparently there wasn't a huge information problem since Nate Silver has been able to assign them rankings. That isn't a failure of the market, it is a failure of the Daily Kos to choose the best firm from amongst the available options.
I mean, I know conservatives serve as some sort of bogeyman, but this is an odd place to point and say 'lol free market'.
I really can't stand that website and I feel guilty reading it during the election. I knowingly read it to cultivate enthusiasm and outrage.
They had previously been regarded as fairly reputable. Nate just recently updated the rankings and it sent them way, way down.
Every upset conservative I've seen over this has simply seen the name DKOS involved, and proceeded to rant about how DKOS hired a company to fudge polls for them. You know, completely ignoring the actual events. The rest of the conservatives have been pretty happy with the idea that DKOS is admitting the results were bullshit, and taking legal action over it.
...and now the market is going to fuck them, hard. The courts may very well do so as well. This is pretty much how libertarians hope for this sort of thing to go down.
This isn't an indictment of libertarian principles.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Well, one could easily consider it an indictment of Libertarians love of reactive rather then proactive "solutions".
Yes, one could do that if one were looking to attack Libertarians over basically nothing for some reason. I mean, I know they are some sort of nefarious boogeyman on these boards, but that is really really reaching.
I don't think that's an indictment of Libertarians in specific, but regulation does have its place and there seem to be a large group of people who think that unleashing the free market on everything is THE solution and it will keep it self in check because of the free market.
In this case, it wasn't that big of a deal, but bad regulation is and was disastrous in many instances.
In this case, the punishment from the market and the legal system would be both reactive (they get fucked for cheating) and proactive (people have fear of getting fucked by the market and legal system, and so avoid cheating).
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Really, market-wise they should have contacted him, pointed out his results indicated he wasn't actually doing polling then offer to consult about proper statistical distributions in an unrelated manner.
And in a completely free market system there's no means to get compensation for fraud. The government needs to intervene for that.
And in a completely free market system, there's no way to enforce "brands" so R2K could call themselves Gallup next week and reputation becomes impossible to track. Best case scenario it erects additional entry barriers into most markets and the invisible hand becomes intangible as well.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
And all but the most extreme forms of libertarianism allow for an extremely small government that enforces contracts and property rights (under which intellectual property rights is a subset), so I'm not sure who you are even raging against. I mean, there are plenty of valid critiques of libertarian stances on various policy issues and such, but trying to tie this to them is just silly.
Right its just that calling that a "small" government is silly. In order to enforce contracts you need to regulate the market to define what constitutes a contract violation, fraud, etc. You need a court system. You need a means to enforce those rulings financially. You need a police force to enforce those rulings physically. You need a system for intellectual property rights and their enforcement.
This isn't a free market fixes thing example because the only thing that is holding R2K responsible is the government. I said R2k could rebrand as Gallup but they could also rebrand as PolitickPolling.org. It isn't a particularly good refutation of free marketeers because life handles that just fine.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+