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I think he hints at the concept that, because of the emergence of the internet, certain statistical analyses may now be redundant, or worse yet, not actually ac
by dcalacci 14y ago
I think he hints at the concept that, because of the emergence of the internet, certain statistical analyses may now be redundant, or worse yet, not actually accurate. If the average voters' feelings can be adequately captured using aggregate search data, what other types of polling can be augmented or replaced with data from Google, or Facebook, or Twitter?
Pure statistical analysis and true polling will probably never be replaced, due to their sheer importance and applicability, so I'm not trying to suggest that people start using Google data rather than creating their own surveys. But I'm certain that there exist some academic researchers who would leap at the idea of using [Aggregate Facebook Statuses, 2010-2011] as a source for their next piece of research.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoIf people start paying serious attention to this sort of analysis, motivated parties will begin to manipulate the data.
- brown9-2 14y agoWhat would be the point of manipulating the data used to make a prediction? How would that influence the final event - the number of votes cast? Seems like if you have the ability or money to influence the search traffic, you could find plenty of other areas related to the election where you would get a higher rate of return.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoPolitical entities try to create an air of inevitability for their eventual victory. You can see this at work right now in the spinning of various polls. Manipulating the data used to create a prediction is a variation on that theme. If they could reliably do it, they would. Influencing search traffic statistics could be done pretty low-cost, so the return wouldn't have to be that high. It's all part of the gestalt they try to build anyway.
- ams6110 14y agoThere was already a research project that found that twitter could be used to predict the stock market.