[extropy-chat] exit polls

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> 
> Repeating a lie does not make it so.  Exit polls have worked really  
> well here and abroad to predict winners in *fair* elections.

Hm.  Don't want to get involved in this, but I do see a potential 
experimental-design flaw in the above statement.  What gold standard did 
you use to decide whether the election was fair, aside from the exit 
poll itself?

By the way, I'm quite willing to believe that the 2004 US election was 
broken, that most US elections have been broken, that both parties 
cheated, that the 2004 election was the worst yet in the series, that 
things will keep getting worse, that electronic voting marks a 
qualitative line of demarcation, and that there's nothing I can do about 
it *directly* and I probably shouldn't even have spent the seconds 
writing this sentence.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence