Many people today are asking, "How could the poles be so wrong?" I think that I may have part of the answer in this blog.
First off, how do we get our knowledge about things? We use our brains to observe and based on those observations, we draw conclusions about things. It works fine if things are not changing very fast, but what happens if things are changing. Here is an example.
How fast is your car going "right now"? You look down at your speedometer and it tells you that your car is going 50 mph and then you look up at the road in front of you assuming that you are going 50 mph. If you were going at a "steady" speed, 50 mph would be the correct answer. If you had the brakes on, when you looked down at the speedometer, then when you looked up at the road, you would actually be going slower than 50 mph. In that case 50 mph would be the wrong answer. I think that something like this is what happened with the poles on the election.
Since Trump was trending up, the poles were always "behind" the true value. At the exact time people were in he voting booths, Trump was actually ahead of Clinton. The purpose of a pole is to first find out where the vote was at the exact time the pole was taken, but by the time the result of the pole was analysed and reported, it was "behind". The step that was missing from the pole reports was the "prediction" part, or where the voters are at the time the results were reported rather than where they were when the pole was taken. Any engineer who is knowledgeable in the area of control systems knows this. The problem is that most of those who were working with the poles were political science majors in college and know little more than 4 th grade math.
The other item is political correctness. Just like in the poling example above, our problem with political correctness is a lot worse than what your old observations have told you. Here is how I think that it affected the poles. Have you ever supervise or participated in a "focus group"? I have. It is very difficult to keep the feelings of the person doing the poling or running the focus group out of the data. I think that most of those doing the poling were liberals and when they asked a question they gave off body language or choice of words that identified what kind of answer they preferred. It was the same for the person being asked.. Do to political correctness, the person being interviewed wanted to keep the interviewer happy by giving them the answer that they wanted. In prior blogs, I pointed out that political correctness makes it OK to tell little white lies if it keeps everyone happy. I think that you can start to see that all this political correctness has created a bunch of voters who are not honest and tell little white lies.
When someone like Trump comes along who is bigger than political correctness it catches most people off guard. They think it is strange for a person to tell the truth when a little white lie would keep everyone happier. I think this may be a repeat, but here goes. I was talking with my father and his older brother about "good friends". I propose a test to see who was the best friend. Both claimed that they had lots of friends and they were "good" friends too. The test was, "Would you tell your best friend if you knew his wife was running around on him?" Easy question, right? My father answered that he was not sure if he would tell his friend or not, but his older brother said, "hell yes!". Now which do you think was the better friend and the one less affected by political correctness?
Our schools, colleges and urban areas are knee deep in political correctness while most of our rural areas are not. Now look at the election results and tell me if you think that political correctness had any thing to do with the results?
PS---For the record. Females are infected with political correctness to a much greater degree than are men. That is one of the main reasons that the poles and the votes were so different between females and males. Females don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and find political correctness a good cover for telling little white lies. Further, most of our school teachers are female. How do you think that affects the attitude of our young people's voting habits?
First off, how do we get our knowledge about things? We use our brains to observe and based on those observations, we draw conclusions about things. It works fine if things are not changing very fast, but what happens if things are changing. Here is an example.
How fast is your car going "right now"? You look down at your speedometer and it tells you that your car is going 50 mph and then you look up at the road in front of you assuming that you are going 50 mph. If you were going at a "steady" speed, 50 mph would be the correct answer. If you had the brakes on, when you looked down at the speedometer, then when you looked up at the road, you would actually be going slower than 50 mph. In that case 50 mph would be the wrong answer. I think that something like this is what happened with the poles on the election.
Since Trump was trending up, the poles were always "behind" the true value. At the exact time people were in he voting booths, Trump was actually ahead of Clinton. The purpose of a pole is to first find out where the vote was at the exact time the pole was taken, but by the time the result of the pole was analysed and reported, it was "behind". The step that was missing from the pole reports was the "prediction" part, or where the voters are at the time the results were reported rather than where they were when the pole was taken. Any engineer who is knowledgeable in the area of control systems knows this. The problem is that most of those who were working with the poles were political science majors in college and know little more than 4 th grade math.
The other item is political correctness. Just like in the poling example above, our problem with political correctness is a lot worse than what your old observations have told you. Here is how I think that it affected the poles. Have you ever supervise or participated in a "focus group"? I have. It is very difficult to keep the feelings of the person doing the poling or running the focus group out of the data. I think that most of those doing the poling were liberals and when they asked a question they gave off body language or choice of words that identified what kind of answer they preferred. It was the same for the person being asked.. Do to political correctness, the person being interviewed wanted to keep the interviewer happy by giving them the answer that they wanted. In prior blogs, I pointed out that political correctness makes it OK to tell little white lies if it keeps everyone happy. I think that you can start to see that all this political correctness has created a bunch of voters who are not honest and tell little white lies.
When someone like Trump comes along who is bigger than political correctness it catches most people off guard. They think it is strange for a person to tell the truth when a little white lie would keep everyone happier. I think this may be a repeat, but here goes. I was talking with my father and his older brother about "good friends". I propose a test to see who was the best friend. Both claimed that they had lots of friends and they were "good" friends too. The test was, "Would you tell your best friend if you knew his wife was running around on him?" Easy question, right? My father answered that he was not sure if he would tell his friend or not, but his older brother said, "hell yes!". Now which do you think was the better friend and the one less affected by political correctness?
Our schools, colleges and urban areas are knee deep in political correctness while most of our rural areas are not. Now look at the election results and tell me if you think that political correctness had any thing to do with the results?
PS---For the record. Females are infected with political correctness to a much greater degree than are men. That is one of the main reasons that the poles and the votes were so different between females and males. Females don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and find political correctness a good cover for telling little white lies. Further, most of our school teachers are female. How do you think that affects the attitude of our young people's voting habits?
