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Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

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Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#21

Post by rolux »

jsdalton wrote: post #17
rolux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing that link, good article. Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.

What is your thesis, exactly? People have a finite amount of attention they are willing to devote to politics, and the obsession with polling thus excludes them from paying attention to these supposedly undemocratic features? Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower…

If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#22

Post by RyanMcGreal »

jsdalton wrote: post #17
rolux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing that link, good article. Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.

What is your thesis, exactly? People have a finite amount of attention they are willing to devote to politics, and the obsession with polling thus excludes them from paying attention to these supposedly undemocratic features? Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower…

Here's a hypothesis for you: it's easier to follow the polls than it is to follow the issues, and when polling soundbites are ubiquitous, people will tend to follow the polls instead of following the issues.

You can spend an hour watching a presidential debate (plus additional hours looking up the various claims made), or you can spend a minute reading the heading, deck and first paragraph of an article that says this or that candidate "won" the debate.

Polls function as a kind of supernormal stimulus [1] that displace real analysis, in a manner analogous to the way that junk food, which distils fat, sugar and salt to their essence, displaces whole foods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#23

Post by scarmig »

27182818284 wrote: post #16
scarmig wrote: post #15

Here's a slightly OT question, for politically inclined folks: How likely would you be to look at a site that on election day scrapes election results as they come in from various swing states, and extrapolates the state result by projecting each county individually from already reported precincts? Obvious some assumptions about precinct homogeneity and turnout implicit in that, but it'd provide at least some value o…

I think you basically described FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight definitely doesn't do this, or hasn't in the past, it least. It models via demographics and polling, while this would be a much simpler model basing its predictions on already reported results.

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#25

Post by railsjedi »

railsjedi wrote: post #2

Developer here. I helped build this site after noticing I was checking presidential polls like 12 times a day and really wanted a quick disposable tool for the next 2 weeks to get them as soon as they are released. On Nov 6th, we'll shut the site down and permanently delete the entire list. Hope you find it useful!

We'll also be tweeting out poll results from http://twitter.com/pingpoll

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#26

Post by mayneack »

ilconsigliere wrote: post #7
rolux wrote: post #4

Not being a US citizen, I'm always quite stunned by what I perceive as an obsession with polling results. Especially when fundamental flaws in the US voting system (see, for example, http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/ ) seem to get widely ignored. Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing ex…

The New Yorker is talking about this very subject today: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/da... I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes later..

Nate Silver (probably in response to some of these things) also has a blog about the limits of his (and other) models: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/oct-23-t...

Re: Show HN: Get notified when new presidential polls are released

#28

Post by harshpotatoes »

Living in an "important swing state" at the moment, the last thing I need is more factoids about the presidential race. Every form of media is completely saturated with the same talking points, and it is quite exhausting. It would be nice to hear more about the senate, house and state elections. I don't think I've seen any media coverage/ads for any election besides the presidential race.
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