Posted by luu 2 days ago
https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
Or when Kim Jong Un won in 2012, spelling out "KJUGASCHAMBER":
https://observer.com/2012/12/4chan-successfully-votes-kim-jo...
This is evidence, but it would be a mistake to think that high profile online contests would have the same dynamics as low profile online polling. 4chan is characterized by an insane level of effort on the specific jokes that they care about. But they don't care about a random poll nearly as much as they care about big stunts like this.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2026/html/ecb.pr2609...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-for-jesus-poll-15-of-jewi...
Assuming an identity doesn't make it your culture, right? It says more about the person who assumes it. Messianic Jews are a form of bonkers identitarians who existed even before the current fad.
No, there's no quotient of Jewish people who would take the question of belief in Christ to mean "do you believe Jesus was an historical person who walked around Samaria in sandals". Pretty much all Jews agree that Jesus was a real renegade rabbi who wore shoddy footwear. The definition of being Jewish is that you don't believe he was the Messiah, because the Messiah hasn't arrived yet. Anyone who clicks the buttons that they're Jewish and that they believe in the divinity of Jesus is clearly a throwaway on the survey.
Movies and TV tell me everyone in Judea and Samaria wore sandals back then. Why single out one guy? Or was Jesus's pair particularly scuffed, ratty, and worn-out?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
The responses got stored in a database, as well as being emailed raw to the relevant managers. The numerical responses could be quantified and tracked over time, but there was pretty much no standard of measurement for the hundreds of thousands or millions of free writing boxes over the years.
A year ago I set up a small locally run classifier model to back test and "score" all that stuff, and to try to reveal patterns that might have been hidden.
The classifier did turn up a bunch of sets of complaints that had been overlooked by upper management. But even more so, it flooded the company with false positives of negative reviews.
It turns out that a lot of positive reviews include false-negative idiomatic expressions like "killer service" or "it beat the shit out of staying at...", which the classifier considered extremely negative.
Just a warning to anyone who thinks LLMs will help clarify the user's intent... they won't. This really makes me ponder the value of putting faith into the voodoo of the LLM's probability metrics, a la Jev. I think you may just be betting on a derivative of a fundamentally broken system, where trusting some early underlying abilities leads you to lean on a confidently presented but ultimate unsupported probability number you want to bet on, but which has no mathematical relationship to any real probability.
Nobody enjoys that experience; I personally am a "bogus" respondent.
Edit: I am a poor survey respondent to non-opt-in polls, and do not opt-in to polls where possible.
--> Claude informs me ("why are there bogus respondents to polls you have to opt-into anyway?") that most are there because surveys pay a little money; so it's botted too.
A lot of people will only do online polling, and it's by far the easiest way to cover a lot of demographics (need to supplement with other methods as well if you don't want a poll of "internet users" - but that is a far larger and varied group than most other methods would produce)
Online polling isn't an improvement, it's just a different error.
In fact, online polls are worse because you now have to make sure the "people" answering are actually people and are actually able to influence whatever polling data you're trying to gather.
They've gone from gathering a dataset that's been becoming less reliable to one that is even less reliable.