Saturday, May 28, 2005

Thoughts at 4 am

Last night while kept awake because of a screaming, drunken tirade complete with plastic vodka bottles hurled from opposing windows on either side of my front porch, I had plenty of time (the entire night) to think, and I came up with two troubling ideas. The first concerns public polls. I'm not sure how it has eluded my attention so far, but the complete and alarming absurdity of eliciting public opinion, then displaying it in a graph to be observed by, I guess those of us who didn't participate in the poll, but whose opinion is nontheless statistically represented, occured to me while I was reading an old paper I wrote about public opinion polls and the Vietnam war. I personally don't care about public opinion, but it now seems clear that the motivation for reproducing the results of such a thing is to manipulate the observer. What purpose is served by my, or anyone elses, learning what the percentage is of people who support a war or a bureacrat or a make of car? Entertainment? Justification? Illumination? Validation?

Sadly, I don't have time to report on my other late insomnia inspired revelation. I have to go play baseball now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

polls are kinda like "hey, everybody else feels this way, so it must be true. what's the matter with me that i hold a different opinion?". anybody can make up a fake poll, and then have that poll influence people for real, because everybody wants to conform don't they?

Bill Eseltine said...

Why haven't the Dems started using this trick yet?