This is pretty scary. I guess I always assumed political scientists understood how crude their poll data is and just did the best they could within those constraints. It’s a little shocking to hear how far in denial they are, but then again, I shouldn’t be surprised since everyone is discussing echo chambers these days. Sorry to hear how you weren’t able to start a dialogue based on your theoretical model. I’m facing different, but similar, issues in education.
By the way, I was thinking of you when I read this in the article:
The axiom of revelation of preferences states the following: you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them –they themselves don’t know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or what are the reasons they give you or themselves for that. (Think about it: revelation of preferences is skin in the game).
How useful are polls when people have no skin in the game responding to polls? I’m reminded how a lot of people voted for Trump even though they told pollsters they disapproved of Trump. The conventional wisdom is that those voters simply disapproved of Hillary even more. But maybe, they thought one way about Trump when they had no skin in the game in a poll and thought differently when they did at the ballot box.
