What if the Polls Didn’t Exist?
American politics would be different — and better
It’s generally accepted that more information is a good thing. Today, we live in an age of information abundance, in contrast to the information scarcity that most humans in history experienced. We’re swimming in information. Maybe we’re drowning in it.
There’s so much information assaulting our brains at every moment that I fear we’re losing our ability to assess it. It feels like it’s getting hard for people to tell which information is important and which isn’t. And, perhaps more worryingly, it seems like it’s getting harder for people to tell whether the information flying at them 24/7 is true or not.
It seems pretty clear that not all types of information are created equal. Some tell us important truths about the world around us. Others just distract us for a nanosecond before we move on to something else. Others are just information-like substances — like the sawdust they used to put in food to make it go farther.
As this election trundles on toward its inevitable conclusion, I’ve begun to wonder whether polls are one of these information-like substances, the sawdust in our news coverage. While horse-race polls do tell us something about the world — essentially, that the presidential race will be very close — they also drive…
