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Results of this debate disagree with you https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-threatened-campus https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/deba

• geofft 9y ago
  ... pardon my assumption, but those four people don't look like college students. Are they?
• pmyteh 9y ago
  The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the speakers that they've found to present it, even sympathy for someone who got obviously crushed by their opponent. When I was a debater I've seen some truly outrageous motions get passed simply because one side was funnier.
  • dominotw 9y ago
    I understand. I was responding to comment that said its totally baseless caricature. I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account? Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?
    • pmyteh 9y ago
      Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself. (And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results that are useful. Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.)
      • dominotw 9y ago
        > Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing. Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?
        • pmyteh 9y ago
          If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1 of being chosen. So it's statistically maximally valid. We (political scientists) tend to squint a bit and say the opportunity to vote is equivalent to actually voting, so non-voting doesn't harm the legitimacy of elections. I don't personally buy that, but it's a tricky problem to fix.
          • dominotw 9y ago
            So if am I reading this correctly. Previously you said "any self selected polling is meaningless" Now you are saying "Self selected polling is meaningful when people who didn't self select had the opportunity to do so" . Ok. So by that definition the poll I linked, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the debate, theoretically. What makes it meaningless ? PS: Fixing democracy ect is not interesting to me in this context, I want to focus your claim self-selected = meaningless.
            • pmyteh 9y ago
              Because I, for one, didn't know it was happening and therefore could not participate. My chance of having my opinion count was zero. So pretty much by definition the poll is not representative of the universe of people-who-include-me. And by induction of all the other people who had no chance to participate. If you want to know more, I recipient looking up the 1936 Literary Digest poll for US President, one of the most famous screwups caused by non-random sampling: https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.html https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...