Vote early, vote often
The West Island seems to have an even worse problem with bogus polls than we do. The Sydney Morning Herald carried an article on the Friends of Science in Medicine, and their campaign to have medical degrees only teach stuff that actually, you know, works. This article was accompanied by a poll. According to the poll, 230% of readers of the article wanted alternative medicine taught in medical degrees, and the other 570% didn’t. That is, eight times as many people voted as read the article.
It gets better. The SMH followed up with a story about the poll rigging, and for some reason included a new poll asking whether people regarded website poll results as serious, vaguely informative, purely for entertainment, or misleading. Yesterday morning “Serious” had 87% of the vote. Now it’s 95%, with vote totals almost as high as the previous inflated figures.
If you’re even tempted to believe bogus media website polls, we have a bridge we can name after you.
[thanks for the link, Brendon]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »