4 ms·
Totally misleading title. "Polls" is one thing, poll aggregators are a whole other thing. I was really excited to read about actual polls that are somehow open
by teleclimber 10y ago
Totally misleading title. "Polls" is one thing, poll aggregators are a whole other thing.
I was really excited to read about actual polls that are somehow open source (not sure how that would work though).
- cruise02 10y agoOpen source would not be nearly as impressive as reproducible.
- teleclimber 10y agoYes, although is reproducibility even possible in polls? People's opinions change on a whim. In fact people's opinions can change simply because they were asked a question so the answer might be different if asked the question again, I guess you could conduct the same poll with multiple sets of people and see how the results compare, but in a way that's what poll aggregators do.
- maxerickson 10y agoIsn't the reasonable definition of reproducible for a poll having overlapping margins of error? A useful poll should do that. The result is qualified, comparisons of results shouldn't ignore that.
- jbondeson 10y agoThe hardest part of an open source poll would be anonymization. Demographic information in some areas could be enough to come pretty close to uniquely identifying an individual. The rest of it: Likely Voter Models, Demographic Weighting, etc would be pretty easy to have open source and reproducible once you've solved the issues.
- teleclimber 10y agoYes anonymization is the problem I was thinking of.
- sctb 10y agoOK, we've added "Aggregators" to the story title to clarify.