Polling? Hmm..... maybe if we look at it THIS way....

There I wuz......

Reading a story from a local public radio station about a political poll.  The conclusion of the poll they were waxing happy over was counter-intuitive enough that I began researching the polling outfit, and who hired them.

Strange thing.... it seems no-one tracks polling outfits, and most carefully.... no-one keeps track of how often their polls reflect reality.   Huh.  Who woulda thunkit?

Anyway, this tossed my mind into the wayback machine, and dialed me a decade or two into the past.  I was sitting in an auditorium at PSU's main campus, listening to an utter whack-job expound on the evils of keeping a student in their chair for more than 45 minutes.

Professor whack-job used a solid 4 hours of our time, without breaks, to explain his point.

He was wearing a foam cowboy hat at the time.

Leaving aside the criminal way in which PSU created the situation where they 'legally' stole $2000 of my money and 5 days of my time, I'll move on to my reaction to professor whackadoodle.

I took notes, furiously, to the amazement of the other teacher-inmates seated near me.  Page after page of notes, which I referred to for years afterwards til they became ingrained into my professional habits.

What were in my notes, one may ask?   How NOT to teach a class.  I wrote down everything PSU made us suffer through, in fine detail, and titled the notebook 'Everything Wrong You can Do While Teaching".

It turned out to be the second most useful class I was extorted into taking by Penn State.

Fast forward to current history, and my reading of that polling data... or at least as much as they were willing to share.  Truth be told it was more like Opinion, with a smattering of numbers, and no peaking at the math behind it please.

How accurate is political polling?  No one tracks it, that I can find.  So... does that means it's useless?  Maybe..... maybe.

On the other hand, my personal experience and memories tell me that political polling is wrong so often, that one which lucks into 'correct' range is newsworthy indeed.

Hmm..... the contrarian in my soul, the one who used PSU's extortion gambit to enrich my teaching skills in ways that PSU would likely never understand..... THAT part of me is jumping up and down, gibbering with delight. 

The poll-trolls are wrong way.... way.... way.... more than they are right.  Consistently wrong.   *Reliably* wrong.

I adore reliable data sources, with a deep special adore for data sources who don't know what data they actually provide.  Those are the bestus data sources of all.