Numbers Don't Lie--But the People Who Use Them Do

Whenever the media starts talking about polls and poll numbers and such, treating the results of this poll or that poll with all the seriousness of a scientific study, it makes me wonder if anyone really understands the poll process and how meaningless such things actually are. I used to work for a market research company and I've seen firsthand how the process works. Whenever the media starts spouting off about the results of this poll or that poll, I always wonder about the questions asked and how they were phrased because I know from experience how much of a difference even a small change in wording can make in the results achieved. I also wonder WHO the questions are being asked of, because that also has an effect.

People have an innate respect for numbers (numbers don't lie), but understand little about how the same set of numbers can be used and manipulated in a wide variety of ways, depending on the way they are categorized (numbers don't lie, but they'll say anything you want if you torture them enough)--for example, the way government agencies "adjust" their statistics by including or removing certain groups of numbers depending on the goal they are trying to achieve. For example, the way the FBI includes certain categories of crimes in their statistics to inflate the crime rate when they want to justify a demand for more money, but delete those same categories when trying to prove how well the agency is doing in reducing the crime rate. Or the way the government ignores certain groups of homeless people by claiming that they aren't REALLY homeless--it seems they only count the number of people who are actually sleeping in parks and on sidewalks, not those who may have any kind of transient housing (apparently sleeping on some one's couch and stashing your belongings in a corner qualifies as having a home).

Or labeling someone a sex offender, without explaining exactly what the offense was--was it an actual rape or child molestation, or was it simple a case of "playing doctor" taken to an absurd extreme? I know a man who will be forever tagged as a sex offender because he was caught playing you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine with a neighbor girl--he was all of 11 years old and the girl (whose mother had him arrested) was 10. I remember that man every time the MSM plasters some one's name and face all over the screen as a dangerous SO without explaining exactly what his crime might have been.

Now, there is also the matter of how the questions are formulated. When I was doing phone surveys, we would be given a list of questions and told to ask them exactly as written--no explanations allowed, even when the question did not make sense. In longer surveys, certain questions might be repeated but in slightly different form, so that a different answer might be given--thus cancelling out the answer previously given. Or they might ask a series of what could be called "leading-the-witness" questions, designed to elicit a particular answer--say Candidate A commissions a poll to find out how many votes he can expect to get in a particular area. His poll gives a choice between himself and three others, which we'll call Candidates B, C, and D and asks which one you are going to vote for.

Say the results come out like this: Candidate A--10, Candidate B--20, Candidate C--30 and Candidate D--40. Obviously, this is not the result Candidate A wanted, so he starts fiddling with the questions--eliminating B, C, or D from the list, hoping the people who would have voted for that candidate will pick him instead, or include different candidates which he knows have little popular support, which will inflate his own numbers. Or change the question to one about platforms rather than the candidates themselves, adjusting his own platform until it matches what people seem to want--regardless of his actual position on the issues.

Yet another factor is the human one--people lie, especially when it come to politics. This fact is only now beginning to be recognized by MSM, but only grudgingly, with the implications that the lying is borne out of racism--people don't want to ADMIT that they don't want to vote for a black man or a woman because racism and sexism are politically incorrect, or some other nonsense. Why is it that because someone who won't vote for Clinton they must be sexist (and not because they see Clinton as Bush-Lite), or Obama because they are racist (and not because he lacks experience in government)? Race and sex are simply ways in which the powers that be use the media to play on the people's sensibilities in order to divide and control--when are we going to see that and stop playing the game?