2357: Polls vs the Street

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Polls vs the Street
Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.
Title text: Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

Explanation

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If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Parody of some Orwellian "don't trust the numbers" mentality. Based on when this comic was released, it probably regards either Trump as 2020 candidate or how dangerous SARS-CoV-2 truly is.

Transcript

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White Hat: Polls are just numbers.
White Hat: You have to talk to people on the street.
White Hat: Polls say most people support <Candidate X>.
White Hat: But the people I talk to on the street support <Candidate Y>.
White Hat: Polls claim most people don't live in my town and have never been here.
White Hat: But the people I meet on the street tell a very different story.
White Hat: According to polls, most people don't like playing in traffic.
White Hat: So why do I never seem to meet these people on the street?


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Discussion

Love the title text! Fwacer (talk) 23:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I Edit Conflicted with someone (2 minutes too late, after quite a bit of typing, then half a dozen Captcha submissions - just two to put this text in). If anyone wants to review my attempt, I'm HTML-commenting it in this gap... ...I already knew I'd have to Wikilink some bits, and can see at least one typo. Maybe I'll integrate some into what's there now, myself but probably not tonight. 162.158.158.241 00:39, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

(Self-reply) Looking into it, I must have been editing for a whole hour, actually. Didn't feel like it, but given there wasn't even a transcript when I started (but the BOT had been replaced) I must have been. And I want paying for all the Captcha responses I'm asked for. It seems I'm either being 'a useful idiot' for slavishly helping the Algorithm, or I am far better(/worse?) at identifying traffic lights, crosswalks, motorbikes, traffic and bicycles than "the man on the street" that pre-populated the Captcha knowledgebase thresholds... 162.158.158.175 00:54, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I swear half of the answers were wrong in the first place. One time I took a capatcha and it misidentified a mailbox as a parking meter and I had to answer wrong on purpose to get through.
One that I didn't get a 'by' on (I'm convinced that being correct just gives you another test in order to generate that result with more authority) was a request for "bicycle" that featured a surface-painted bike-lane symhol. I said "skip" as there was no actual bike (like features that clearly look cross-walkish but aren't even on the road, or horizontal). So unless most other people had a more generous/playful citeria, I should have been correct. And I'm a whiz at identifying hydrants (in my mind?) Of all kinds of colours, but I think there must be far too many opposing opinions. (Traffic Lights: Do you just highlight the lit bits? The composite frames upon which all the lights sit? The whole lot including the support poles/cables? And do you choose frames that have a sneaky tiny bit of overlap of your chosen feature, but are otherwise mostly empty? Or exclude squares that have a slice that wouldn't be recognised as such if given in isolation?) 162.158.159.110 13:04, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
Select everything containing a part you would expect to receive if you ordered it fully assembled from amazon. Full frame, but cables not included. All of the car. All the nuts on the hydrants. All the lines on the crosswalk. Mailbox includes the stick in the ground, but not the wall of the house when mounted on one. If it takes a second glance to tell it isn't what it asked for, then select it anyways. normies don't have time to double check their answer when trying to post their lols on cat videos.

108.162.238.39 13:59, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, sounds like what I do with edge-cases (except I do check carefully, so that I'm right, no matter what), but if other people are being sloppy, I'll have to he careful to be sloppy, eh? ;) 162.158.158.241 01:10, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Reminiscent of this beautifully snarkastic tweet. https://twitter.com/DavidLJarman/status/1302719537234599936 172.68.189.173 03:27, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that it is morally indefensible to tell the truth to pollsters. And also to people doing a Vox Populi. If you believe one party is better for the people in your country, then you have a moral duty not to sabotage them. But if everyone tells the pollsters honestly that they are definitely going to vote for party X, you could have everyone believing that it's a foregone conclusion that party X will win, so they don't bother to go out in the rain to vote, and party Y gets in - because they thought their party needed their vote. 162.158.38.24 21:45, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

In England the word on the Street is most often SLOW (in Wales it's is ARAF SLOW) :-D RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 18:56, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Or BUS / BWS STOP 162.158.154.173 09:53, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
And in some parts of Canada, it's SLOW LENT, even when it's nowhere near Easter.Jkshapiro (talk) 01:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)