Poisoning the Data

[digitaldiscipline]

I take a somewhat perverse pleasure from participating in opinion polls, should someone conducting one happen to catch me. Recently, the victims of my whimsy were none other than the National Rifle Association. They have a very ingenious, if completely transparent, way of skewing their survey data in a way most folks might not even bother to notice.

"Hi, this is [caller's name], and I'm an NRA member. Would you take a minute to listen to this recorded message from [dude's name], President of the NRA, and then answer a brief survey?"

[dude's recorded message plays; it is an unremittingly negative portrayal of leading democrats' purported "assault" on the 2nd Amendment, absolutely none of which has any factual basis as far as I've been able to tell]

"Hi, this is [someone else], and I'm an member of the NRA. Our survey is just one question: do you think the President is doing the right thing when it comes to protecting our 2nd Amendment rights?"

"I absolutely do. Good try, and have a nice day."

"Hrmf. Thank you."

Comments

[normalcyispasse.livejournal.com]

Ha. Cute that you think they'll record your answer as given. :)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I figure they are probably fairly straightforward in recording the answers they actually get, since the way they introduce themselves and the tenor of the recording all but guarantees most of their non-target audience is apt to hang up.

[ivy]

I *am* an NRA member (you have to be, to shoot at one of the ranges near me), and their spin annoys the hell out of me sometimes. I am allergic to propaganda even when it's a cause that I agree with; it annoys me that it's so effective in dealing with the majority of the population. I feel like if my side in any discussion really is all that right, that we should be able to persuade others of the fact without resorting to rhetorical trickery and slanting of stats and such. Sadly, this is often distressingly ineffective. I'm not sure how to address this, other than "don't join groups that do this, which is almost all of 'em".

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I kind of figured you and/or Jay would have something to say here. Heh.

[ivy]

[grin] Yeah, well, annoying pushy behaviour is obnoxious regardless of who does it. I value my friends whether or not they disagree with me on any given issue; I think that's far healthier than only having clones-of-your-opinion as friends. (Like people who only read news sources that they agree with... well, of course they're going to feel like their worldview is confirmed, whether or not it's actually right.)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

But what if they *are* actually right? ;-)

Honestly, I don't have a problem with groups like the NRA; I have a problem when they get pushy about their agenda and stoop to lying and/or discounting reality/facts/etc to achieve it. See also: Tea Party, Christianist moralizing, corporate interests, et alia.

[ivy]

We are in total agreement on your second paragraph. I wish they'd cut that shit out. (Stop making me look bad!, for starters. It's a variant of GetOffMyTeam.) And there are other considerations that outweigh their political recommendations for me... I'm not going to vote for someone who's pro-gun but anti-gay, or pro-gun and pro-life, for example. So mostly I feel annoyed that their political agenda disregards many things important to me in favor of this one issue. Yes, it's an issue I care about, but it's not more important than everything else put together. But why there are few politicians that I substantially agree with is a whole different rant. [grin]

Re: your first paragraph, if I'm convinced, I'll change my mind. [grin] It's happened before. The most recent example of that I can think of was discussing how to help out the third world with maramaye after her return from volunteering with Kiva overseas for a year. She came back more pro-capitalism than she left, which was a shock to both her and me. (I am not so much a fan there. My value system is not based in property rights or money.) But after listening to her talk about it, I had to grit my teeth and accept that it probably was helping people in the areas she studied more than most NGO programs had. I didn't want that to be what worked, but, engineer brain had to suck it up and admit that it did.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I agree with 1st paragraph almost entirely; the "almost" part comes from what I've seen variously described as bellweather single-issues voting, which is more or less the way I judge the lesser of many possible evils:

Fundamentally, I think that a politician's stance on something like abortion is generally indicative of their overall attitude towards an individual's rights; I will, unless there is massive countervailing evidence of douchebaggery, vote for the candidate who is the most Pro-Choice, becasuse that attitude suggests that they will be more likely to agree with my preferred stance on other rights to privacy/personal behavior/etc.

As for your 2nd paragraph, in the specific context mentioned, I wonder if the "best" answer may be one that hasn't been found yet, and that what's currently being practiced (or lurching towards implementation) is simply a better option than what you and she had preferred initially, in the absence of the first-hand experience she's since had?

[ivy]

For me it's a balance. I usually don't get everything I want or even close to it in a candidate; I want compassion and civil liberties both, and apparently that's not real popular. So, yeah, I suspect that you and I substantially agree on privacy and personal choices largely being not the government's business, etc.

Re: best answer not found yet, I suspect it's one of those horrifying moments of "wait, you mean NO ONE really knows?". I'm a lot less certain on the think-I-know than many of my more conservative friends there, which makes arguing irritating. I want a nuanced discussion, they want to smack me over the head with the sledgehammer of how right they are until I agree. So finding out that they were more correct than I was there was totally galling, but I don't want to let my annoyance at the situation get in the way of my ability to critically evaluate better results than my way produced. I continue to hope that there are better still methods, and that we can right some of the world's unfairness.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

"The law ends at my skin" - pretty much, yeah. That includes thoughts, etc.

I think that the vast majority of things like this are too complex for anyone to understand completely; if someone has a pretty good idea, their proposed solution might work very well because, in spite of their incomplete understanding, it manages to address those holes adequately. Conversely, if one of those holes torpedoes an otherwise sound strategy, it ends up completely sucking and catches people by surprise.

As far as nuance - if someone nuanced comes around to the blunt force side of an argument, they'll still have a nuanced take on it. That may or may not be able to be communicated to the blunt force folks with whom they now agree, thereby at least spreading the clue-meme of nuanced thought.

Also, a million dollars and a pony.