Sunday rant: How to falsely sell poll data, or, Peee-ew Research

Not content to distort the findings of this poll just once, both Peee-ew "Research" and the media decided to twice falsely sell it. Next poll, they'll go for a trinity.

Now, be sure to check the link above, which goes to a pie chart that shows the poll results in question. Note the heading: "Total U.S. population." Note the breakdown of responses, wherein a whopping twenty-five percent of respondents said no to torture. Note that four percent didn't know or care, or else hung up the phone. Notice that this leaves a large and (in my view) scary percentage of folks who think torture is justified to some extent or another: seventy-one percent. That's 71 out of every 100 folks, people. I mean people, folks.

So, of course, all around the Net you'll find discussions of that seventy-one percent figure. Yes? Well, not exactly. Rather, you'll encounter people discussing one of two press articles--the one which has the population pretty evenly split on the issue (!!) and the other, more famous one, which links rate of churchgoing to willingness to condone torture! At Huff-Po, well over 4,000 comments have appeared at the site's main religion-responsible-for-torture post, and most of these are variations on or exact repeats of the same ol' Why Don't Religionists Go Back to Religion Land Where They Came From? corn. People of faith can't think, we have no morality, we live in the Dark Ages, we don't even try to crack wind quietly, etcetera. (What do you mean, all true??)

How did the fact that 71 out of 100 citizens support torture become a population evenly split and/or a matter of church attendance? Because Peee-ew and the press have the combined integrity of a bubblegum molecule left on the surface of Mercury for 500 years and then stomped on repeatedly by an angry bull. On a good day, that is. On a bad day, considerably less.

The pretty-much-evenly-split lie was easily accomplished: Pee-ew and/or the press combined the "never" and "rarely" responses. Sweet, no? Never mind that those who think torture is justified "rarely" are advocates of torture. Never mind the fact that, in a pro/con poll, "never" means no but "rarely" still means yes. Too nuanced for Pee-ew, I guess.

The swipe against religion was also easily managed: Pee-ew and/or our alleged press simply broke down the data according to religious groupings. And what's wrong with that, you ask?

Plenty. Namely, there was no reason whatsoever to introduce the poll findings to the public in a manner that indicts religion when the main poll (from which the religious study was derived) indicts 71 out of 100 citizens. When seventy-one percent of the darn population is pro-torture, it isn't a matter of religion. Or car ownership. Or where you live. Or what bus you take. Nearly 3/4 of the public IS the public. The body politic is the culprit, not people of faith.

Of course, both Pee-ew and the our alleged press wanted to soft-pedal the bad news, and so why not in a way that caters to the prejudices of the primary consumers of data? I refer, of course, to the secular left, as it's called (which, technically, I'm a part of). To be sure, the main deifiers of data are liberals who simply "know," owing to their superior intellect and education, that data is never wrong, that whatever is computed from a poll is the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the (Peee-ew) stinking truth. Funny how those who worship at the altar of Data have the nerve to ridicule those who worship a human-style God. Anyway....

Please note that I didn't say all liberals are this stupid when it comes to data, though I am convinced it's most of us. Everybody's dumb about something, and the left's main area of brain-shutdown is data. Statistics. Study results. Ooooo-woooo! Study results!!! Data! Figures!!

Ahhhh.... Cigarette time.

Did I mention that most of the data worshipers at Huff-Po apparently failed to follow the links to the pie chart--the one which clearly lays out the figures? The reason they didn't is because, unlike me, they smelled nothing fishy about the poll reports, such as the fact that the two main reports didn't gel. You see, that's always a clue that things haven't been reported correctly--when two big stories turn out to be at odds with one another. Just call me gifted, that I'm able to pick up on such subtle and obscure clues.

Even after I pointed people to the link, no one could fathom what I was complaining about. Too abstract, I guess. I mean, here we have a main poll that indicts 71 out of 100 respondents, yet the results are being touted as a virtual tie between pro and con, and/or another example of why religion is evil and smelly and just so un-HBO. It's almost as if... as if... dare I say? Almost as if the peddlers of the data intended to cater to what their data consumers most want to hear. Which, of course, isn't the truth (something no one wants to hear, anyway).

I guess it's an aberration of the Information Age that data has become a church--I can't see people in the days before computers investing all of their trust in figures on a piece of paper, though there must have been some people so inclined. Anyway, we have three reasons to not feel at ease here: 1) A bunch of people are reading an awful lot into results from a for/against poll; 2) no one notices or at least cares when it's demonstrated that the data has been misrepresented; and 3) pollsters and the press seem to have no moral reservations about shaping data to the expectations of their core audience. Which raises the obvious question: why don't they simply make the stuff up in the first place? Why even go to the trouble of collecting it?

Fabricating it from the get-go would be a lot easier, but, hey--maybe they like the challenge.

What would Jesus conclude? That the credulity of data consumers stems from wishful thinking and vanity. Like so many human evils. That's my guess. Actually, I don't know what he'd say. "Dimwits," perhaps.