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Polls should have a joke option:
| 4% | 12 votes |
| 37% | 103 votes |
| 42% | 118 votes |
| 15% | 43 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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A gift of a flower will soon be made to you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 14 2015, @09:09AM
Always, and it should always be actually funny.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday June 15 2015, @12:08AM
So you're saying "all of the above"?
Never, let's do our own thing
Sometimes, if it's actually funny
Always, or else what's the point?
The joke option is on me!
(You provided the funny by suggesting that joke options can always be funny)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday June 15 2015, @06:55AM
Always, Joke Option, or what is the point. We need a McGuffin, a Cowboy, I nominate Tork, just because Eth or Hairyfeet would be too obvious. And more often. A poll should not last a week, because we never know what Hilary or Oracle could do in that time, from their Volcanic Island Lairs.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday June 16 2015, @09:44PM
Volcanic Island Lairs
I wish my company would move me out to Hawaii.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @01:03PM
How about a joke option saying "Bullgirl Sally"?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @02:19PM
Proper questionnaires always have a don't know/no-opinion answer, even for a yes/no question. The joke option is the red/green site's version of this option.
So either always include a joke option, or always include a DK/NO option.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday June 15 2015, @09:13PM
Or just don't vote...
Oh no! The poll is sucking me in! I HAVE to choose an option! Oh, the horror--if only there was a "don't care" option!!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @07:23AM
"How many voters don't care" is an useful figure to know. "Just not voting" would deprive the poll results of such a figure.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 21 2015, @06:32PM
It would be a useful figure to know if caring for the poll topic were uncorrelated to participating in the poll. Which is almost certainly not the case.
And that's assuming the poll data were in any way reliable to begin with. Look for the bullet point containing "insane" in the fine print below the poll and read it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:12AM
No, I think you're confusing the poll's topic with the poll's options. It's exactly the correlation that makes it useful [and the uncorrelated votes, which there certainly are, actually pollute the result]. The case you imply where the voters would be uncorrelated to the carers would be best served by two separate polls, with the other one asking if you care about the topic of the first poll.
Just because you care about the poll's topic doesn't mean you care about any option winning -- maybe you think it's irrelevant (whereas the other voters, who also care about the topic, disagree that it's irrelevant).
Yes, I know all about it. Moot point because it applies to the whole poll, not just the joke option.
-GP Anon
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:17AM
Woops, just realized the OP is also anon.. For the record, I'm not that one, I'm just the guy maxwell demon replied to. :-)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:03PM
Since I speak about correlations between both, even if I were confusing them (I don't) it wouldn't matter: If A is correlated with B, then B is correlated with A.
For example, consider a poll asking "Do you think that quablies should be allowed to spux?" With the options "Yes", "No" and "I don't care".
Now let's assume you've got a strong opinion about the topic (so you either think that it is unjustifiable that quablies are not yet allowed to spux, or you think that it is disgusting to even think about the possibility that quablies might spux and therefore it should at no account be allowed), then it is very likely that you feel compelled to vote; you'll of course vote either yes or no, depending on which side you are on.
However if you don't really care if quablies spux, or if they don't spux, then you'll more likely look at the subject, say "meh, who cares" and turn away before even looking at the options. And even if they read the options, there will likely not be a large drive to let people know that they don't care.
Now let's assume that 20% of the readers support spuxing of quablies, another 20% are against it, and 60% don't care. Now further assume that those who care have a 90% probability to vote, while those who don't care only in 10% of all cases will vote. Then you'll have about 43% "Yes" voters, 43% "No" voters and 14% "Don't care" voters. So a majority of the votes will indicate an interest, despite the majority of people is not interested at all.
Your error is to assume that the probability to participate in the poll is independent of the probability of caring about the subject. That assumption is almost certainly wrong, as the more you care about a subject, the more likely you are participating on the vote.
An interesting case in point is the Youtube voting on videos. In the past, you could rate the videos from one to five stars. However Google noticed that the majority of people gave either one or five stars, so they replaced it with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down interface they have now. But why did people mostly give the extreme values? Well, you could blame user stupidity for that (and IIRC Google effectively did so back then) but that's not convincing to me. I think the actual reason is that if people found the video neither either extraordinarily good nor extraordinarily bad, they didn't feel the urge to rate it. So in effect, the rating was mostly done by those taking the extreme positions.
Now I admit I can't point at a study for this; I can only argue with common sense, my own behaviour wrt web polls in general, and the Youtube case being in line with my expectations.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:28PM
What the ~love~? I don't and never assumed that. On the contrary, my argument for the "don't care" option depends on those two probabilities being correlated.
Yes, exactly, those are three useful numbers! You know that 14% of the people who cares about quablies doesn't care if they get spuxed or not.
You don't know how many people doesn't care about quablies. To know that you'd have to make the second poll I suggested, which is presumed would explicitly cater to those who would otherwise say "meh, who cares" and turn away. They'd not vote about spuxing, the question would simply be "Quablies are important business" or "To hell with quablies".
(Disclaimer: I'm a little drunk, but I think I wrote this well enough)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 26 2015, @05:51PM
Well, so I was wrong about where you went wrong, but not about that you went wrong.
But let me first clear up something else: The subject of the poll is not quablies, the subject is whether quablies should be allowed to spux. This subject is related to two topics, namely the topic of quablies, and the topic of spuxing.
And here's the first point where you went wrong: The voting is not only influenced by caring about quablies, but also by caring about spuxing. Note that this affects all options, not just the "don't care" one. If you couldn't care less about quablies, but are absolutely against spuxing, you'll certainly vote "no". So already here your assumption
goes wrong: Not even the "yes"/"no" options tell you reliably whether the voter cares about quablies.
But the "don't care" option is even worse: It needs not even to be positively correlated with caring about either topic. Indeed, it may well be negatively correlated, because people who neither care about quablies not about spuxing but care about the poll topic being about something they do care about are not unlikely to vote "I don't care" in the hope that a large "I don't care" percentage will reduce the likelihood of getting more polls about quablies and/or spuxing (this behavious will be more prominent if there have been several polls about one of those topics before, of course). On the other hand, someone who cares about quablies in general, but couldn't care less about whether they are allowed to spux or not has no more incentive to vote "I don't care" than someone who doesn't care about quablies or spuxing.
The set of users who care about quablies but don't care whether they are allowed to spux is almost certainly not identical with the set of people who decide to vote but don't care about quablies.
All the vote tells you is that 14% of those who dared to vote don't care about quablies. Not more, not less.
Note that things are different in professional surveys: In professional surveys people don't get the questions before they decided whether they want to participate; if all they know is that it is a poll about quablies, one can expect a much higher correlation between participating in the poll and caring about quablies. Moreover, the poll will probably have a separate question "Do you generally care about quablies?" which removes any uncertainty about that question, allowing to make solid statements without relying on speculation about people's motives to participate.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Gorb on Tuesday June 23 2015, @08:32AM
Make voting compulsory......
Is it wrong to have sexual fantasies about cartoon characters?
(Score: 1) by JeffPaetkau on Wednesday June 24 2015, @11:04PM
I used to be responsible for updating the weekly poll on a small local website. I always included a don't know and/or care option. I found it was a good way to gauge what the community thought was important.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:37AM
Why do the Danish/Norwegean get preferential treatment?!
(Score: 3, Funny) by penguinoid on Monday June 15 2015, @05:34PM
It would be very hard to use a poll's data if you don't know where all the joke votes are.
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SrLnclt on Monday June 15 2015, @05:55PM
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday June 15 2015, @07:45PM
I think this is the correct time to choose the Whoosh option.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:30PM
We need a "Whoosh" moderation option
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday June 16 2015, @04:08AM
But in Soviet Russia, joke option is you!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:36PM
That other site, that we love to hate, has the Cowboyneal options. If we should have one I think it should be something about how soylent (green) is people. If we can come up with some funny repeating thing then always otherwise when it's appropriate. The joke option tends to fill the spot as an option when all other options are non-valid answers for you but you still want to click something.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:04PM
Wow. I just broke a tie. 71 vs. 70 Votes..
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 18 2015, @10:51PM
Tied again at 73 / 73.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Saturday June 20 2015, @09:18PM
So did I, 81 to 80. It's as if people have no strong feelings one way or the other [youtube.com]
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:11PM
You broke a tie? [wikipedia.org] Hopefully you promptly replaced it!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday June 20 2015, @04:50PM
include the running results of the poll?
Does that not skew the results?
Does that make the poll invalid?
Does anyone care for the children? (or the parent process either?)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:13PM
Did you read the fine print?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday June 21 2015, @10:51AM
I think each polll should have an IABMCTT option.
The initialism expands to: It's a bit more complicated than that.
Often polls, even when carefully constructed, do not cover the range of possibilities expected by those being polled; or oversimplify the issue being polled. I think it would be sensible to have an IABMCTT option so that those being polled can easily indicate that the poll is deficient.
For example, polls can easily be constructed along the following lines:
Q: Have you stopped beating your wife?:
(1) Yes
(2) No
Which can lead to erroneous conclusions being taken from the results.
If the above poll have had the third option:
(3) IABMCTT
I would expect most intelligent vote casters to choose that option.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @07:42PM
just in case you are actually curious. no, I have not stopped beating my wife. have you stopped going to work naked?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @09:40PM
Aha!
So you are a Stella Artois drinker AICMFP.
DYSWIDT?
(Score: 2) by gidds on Monday June 22 2015, @11:52AM
Great idea, but better as the full ITYFIABMCTT, for I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that [badscience.net].
You'd be amazed just how often that phrase comes in useful... (And yes, I do have it on a t-shirt [spreadshirt.co.uk]!)
[sig redacted]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:20PM
I hope the quality of the page is not indicative of the quality of the book.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @07:44PM
Not that I have any good ideas.... Inquiring minds need to know!