People who fill in opinion polls are those who have time. They are likely to be retired, hypochondriac housewives, benefit claimants who don’t want to work and those on furlough who don’t want it to end. Many of them would close night clubs and casinos and curfew drinkers whether there was a virus or not; it is just a vehicle for their killjoy attitudes. Many of them ‘suffer from anxiety’ and think it makes them special and that others should pander to them.
People who are working for a living or running small businesses don’t have time to fill in opinion polls. They are, therefore, a skewed and unrepresentative sample.
I would say it is all that ‘Project Fear’ has been wildly successful, insanely successful. I would also say project fear was planned, and then instituted with a great many Psy-Opps techniques, and a very great many groups colluding who have NO Business playing Government Stooge, in fact it being utterly unethical for them to be doing so. Groups like The MSM, BBC, NHS, SAGE, WHO, CDC, Schools, Unions, Social Media, Corporations, Celebrities, Big Pharma, the Medical-Industrial Complex, and on and on.
The world turned against freedom and Rights, and a new age is on us now, a frightening one. The additional social chaos and militant woke ideology is merely a part of this huge conspiracy against the Western nations, and free people everywhere.
John K
2 years ago
Opinion polls measure what those commissioning them want to be measured. Nothing more, nothing less. And if you ask the same question different ways you get very different answers.
So I look at all such polls with a very jaundiced eye.
Polls have a bias, but are useful. I look at knee-jerk cynicism with a jaundiced eye. The Economist is pretty Left, but is a legitimate news source still, and I would suppose this poll was done fairly properly.
Hahahaa – my post is ‘Awaiting for Approval’ because I failed to use the required *, and so here it is again, c/p, with the offending letter redacted: “Polls have a bias, but are useful. I look at knee-j* erk cynicism with a jaundiced eye. The Economist is pretty Left, but is a legitimate news source still, and I would suppose this poll was done fairly properly.”
Mike Doyle
2 years ago
Learning that the Chinese-governed WHO thinks that easing the UK lockdown is immoral provides great reassurance that it is well judged and timely; for, on the Toynbee scale of irrelevance and inaccuracy the WHO usually score 10
“””well judged and timely”””
that statement would have been good 14 months ago.
Take USA, 1/2 locked down, 1/2 did not. How were the results different? Sweden and Belarus? The entire West Pacific, Koreas, Japan,. China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, no lockdowns but for a couple show ones, deaths per million running about 5 PER MILLION to the Western 2000 PER MILLION.
This lockdown was not about the virus. The youth and economy wrecked, education destroyed, the property ladder made more impossible to enter, jobs and small business destroyed, the healthy denied medical screening and treatment, the economy changed for ever and the super wealthy made super, super, wealthy – to save the over 82 year olds for another year of being locked up? No, this was all NWO.
Andrea X
2 years ago
Can we please see the bleeding questions? Without that information there is very little to understand.
Great book.
But opinion polls are arguably not even really statistics.
Tom Lewis
2 years ago
As brilliant as it was (still is) the UK really could do with a new, updated, “Yes, Minister/ Prime Minister. Once again, we need an insightful, accessible, comedy about how government really works. After all, if they carried out a poll, I’m sure everyone would be in favour of conscription, aren’t they ?
Agreed! And while we’re at it, let’s bring back Spitting Image on mainstream tv!
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
It would be better if these short articles contained more information. For example, how did the responses vary with age? Or between males and females?
I would expect older people to vote for lockdowns and females to vote for removing lockdowns.
Something which really bugs me is that ONS statistics show that twice as many women (compared to men) catch Covid but more than twice as many men (compared to women) die from Covid. To me this means that women want to hug their families and party with friends whilst the men just die.
I said this once on Unherd and men dismissed it talking about genetic issues. Could you imagine the shouts and cries if the figures were the other way around. “Women being let down by the NHS. Women suffering so that men can enjoy themselves”
Jacob Mason
2 years ago
Social taboos seem to be an increasing problem for polling.
Here in the US we had the phenomenon of “the hidden Trump voter” in 2016. Because it was deemed socially unacceptable to vote for Trump, pollsters had a hard time finding a representative sample or getting realistic responses from a representative sample.
Despite being aware of this, the same thing happened in the 2020 election.
Perhaps measures of behavior are becoming increasingly the only real indication of true social attitudes.
David Harris
2 years ago
“It would therefore seem that public attitudes towards <ADD ANY TOPIC HERE> are far more complex than the headlines and polls suggest.”
People who fill in opinion polls are those who have time. They are likely to be retired, hypochondriac housewives, benefit claimants who don’t want to work and those on furlough who don’t want it to end. Many of them would close night clubs and casinos and curfew drinkers whether there was a virus or not; it is just a vehicle for their killjoy attitudes. Many of them ‘suffer from anxiety’ and think it makes them special and that others should pander to them.
People who are working for a living or running small businesses don’t have time to fill in opinion polls. They are, therefore, a skewed and unrepresentative sample.
But they have time to post BTL?
I would say it is all that ‘Project Fear’ has been wildly successful, insanely successful. I would also say project fear was planned, and then instituted with a great many Psy-Opps techniques, and a very great many groups colluding who have NO Business playing Government Stooge, in fact it being utterly unethical for them to be doing so. Groups like The MSM, BBC, NHS, SAGE, WHO, CDC, Schools, Unions, Social Media, Corporations, Celebrities, Big Pharma, the Medical-Industrial Complex, and on and on.
The world turned against freedom and Rights, and a new age is on us now, a frightening one. The additional social chaos and militant woke ideology is merely a part of this huge conspiracy against the Western nations, and free people everywhere.
Opinion polls measure what those commissioning them want to be measured. Nothing more, nothing less. And if you ask the same question different ways you get very different answers.
So I look at all such polls with a very jaundiced eye.
Polls have a bias, but are useful. I look at knee-jerk cynicism with a jaundiced eye. The Economist is pretty Left, but is a legitimate news source still, and I would suppose this poll was done fairly properly.
Hahahaa – my post is ‘Awaiting for Approval’ because I failed to use the required *, and so here it is again, c/p, with the offending letter redacted:
“Polls have a bias, but are useful. I look at knee-j* erk cynicism with a jaundiced eye. The Economist is pretty Left, but is a legitimate news source still, and I would suppose this poll was done fairly properly.”
Learning that the Chinese-governed WHO thinks that easing the UK lockdown is immoral provides great reassurance that it is well judged and timely; for, on the Toynbee scale of irrelevance and inaccuracy the WHO usually score 10
“””well judged and timely”””
that statement would have been good 14 months ago.
Take USA, 1/2 locked down, 1/2 did not. How were the results different? Sweden and Belarus? The entire West Pacific, Koreas, Japan,. China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, no lockdowns but for a couple show ones, deaths per million running about 5 PER MILLION to the Western 2000 PER MILLION.
This lockdown was not about the virus. The youth and economy wrecked, education destroyed, the property ladder made more impossible to enter, jobs and small business destroyed, the healthy denied medical screening and treatment, the economy changed for ever and the super wealthy made super, super, wealthy – to save the over 82 year olds for another year of being locked up? No, this was all NWO.
Can we please see the bleeding questions? Without that information there is very little to understand.
Exactly. The precise way the questions are phrased can make a huge difference to the responses.
see How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff.
Great book.
But opinion polls are arguably not even really statistics.
As brilliant as it was (still is) the UK really could do with a new, updated, “Yes, Minister/ Prime Minister. Once again, we need an insightful, accessible, comedy about how government really works. After all, if they carried out a poll, I’m sure everyone would be in favour of conscription, aren’t they ?
Agreed! And while we’re at it, let’s bring back Spitting Image on mainstream tv!
It would be better if these short articles contained more information. For example, how did the responses vary with age? Or between males and females?
I would expect older people to vote for lockdowns and females to vote for removing lockdowns.
Something which really bugs me is that ONS statistics show that twice as many women (compared to men) catch Covid but more than twice as many men (compared to women) die from Covid. To me this means that women want to hug their families and party with friends whilst the men just die.
I said this once on Unherd and men dismissed it talking about genetic issues. Could you imagine the shouts and cries if the figures were the other way around. “Women being let down by the NHS. Women suffering so that men can enjoy themselves”
Social taboos seem to be an increasing problem for polling.
Here in the US we had the phenomenon of “the hidden Trump voter” in 2016. Because it was deemed socially unacceptable to vote for Trump, pollsters had a hard time finding a representative sample or getting realistic responses from a representative sample.
Despite being aware of this, the same thing happened in the 2020 election.
Perhaps measures of behavior are becoming increasingly the only real indication of true social attitudes.
“It would therefore seem that public attitudes towards <ADD ANY TOPIC HERE> are far more complex than the headlines and polls suggest.”