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Pollsters are now asking AIs to answer surveys as if they were humans and passing the results off as poll statistics (futurism.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -27 points 6 months ago* (28 children)

Good news, maybe this means people will finally stop trusting polls so those of us who still have some semblance of democracy can go vote for the things we actually want to see changed instead of having our choices prejudiced by polls that tell us we must "strategically vote" so we can't have nice things.

Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.

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  • [–] 21 points 6 months ago* (4 children)

    Your problem isn't with stats, polls are still valuable.

    Your problem is political think tanks that pay for biased polling that reflects what they want instead of reality. And billionaire owned media presenting those biases stats with a straight face and hoping no one notices.

    Imagine your back in college and the water bottle you just chugged had vodka in it.

    That's a bad bottle, but the take away should be "verify it's water first" and not "never try to drink water again".

    Meaning you shouldn't disregard all polls, it's just responsible to take a real.looknamd not just believe headlines or even articles.

    Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.

    Even if you'll never vote D in a general, there is literally no downside for voting for the left most candidate in the next Dem primary. Hell, you could even try voting for the left most candidate in the Republican primary instead, I don't think that would be as effective though.

    After all, it's the first step in Marxism-Lenism:

    Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.[12]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism

    Personally I want to exit ramp before all the Stalin stuff, but you can't argue that it didn't work for him.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah, it's the whole "controlled by the state" thing I'll never trust about marxism-leninism. You dont get an informed and organized population by subverting them and taking away their mobility.

    Authoritarianism doesn't lead to freedom.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, Lenin seized power by having all the soviets assassinated by bolsheviks after he lost an election to them. Then the USSR descended into widespread famine, surveillance, and state-sponsored massacres.

    It's wild how many people still swear by marxist-leninism, as if "just try it one more time, this time it'll work, I swear!" Or even wilder "actually, widespread famine, surveillance, and monopolized violence in the USSR was good!"

    And then they just smugly tell you to "read theory" because they assume you haven't already, because they can't imagine anyone would actually read it and think critically about it, since they sure as hell didn't...

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    The problem with economics as a science is that testing some theories can be very expensive.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I've always viewed economics as a pseudo-science.

    There might be some ways to apply the scientific method to economic systems, but even if so it would be a soft science at best.

    But that's not even what's happening in conventional economic theory, and they try to treat it like a hard science.

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  • [–] 52 points 6 months ago (20 children)

    nonoNoNoNO

    Not voting is voting. No politician is going to agree with you on everything and some are much much worse than others.

    This is the hill I die on.

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  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Then I hope you enjoy the system you have because it will never change.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    And not voting changes the system how, exactly?

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago*

    Not voting makes election fraud much easier and therefore getting people you definitively don't want in power.

    You are not happy who you get to vote for in general election? Why not take part in elections that influence it. Local elections, midterms.

    Why not volunteering in campaigns for candidates that you actually support? Maybe even running yourself?

    Ajay promote ranked choice voting.

    We recently had victories for multiple candidates that establishment didn't want to win.

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  • [+] -7 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    "why do they vote for lizards? cause if they didn't then a worse lizard might get in"

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    I could never down vote Douglas Adams.

    Having said that, when was the last time you had two candidates with exactly the same policies. Keeping literal Nazis out is a start, then you can participate in primaries, local politics or whatever for faster change. If you don't participate then you are allowing the dickheads to choose.

    PS by you I don't mean you personally

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  • [+] -15 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    And some are almost exactly the same but painted with two different colors of evil. Strategic voting forces you to choose one. If you think strategic voting is the answer, then that certainly is the hill you are going to die on because the false dichotomy of Kang and Kodos is absolutely going to kill you.

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  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Strategic voting at least staves off the worst for a while. It's not the solution, but it is part of a solution.

    There's no one single thing that will fix everything. Not protesting, not violent action, not voting. They are all part of a whole that is necessary to affecting lasting and positive change. Advocating that people not do one and only do the other lessens all action.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Absolutely agreed, my only point is that people treat it like it's a victory and celebrate like they've won the superbowl, when it's just death by a thousand cuts. People need to understand that strategic voting is not a victory even when it's successful, it's a "we haven't lost yet". The fighting doesn't stop there. There is so much more work to do and the people you voted into office are not going to do it no matter what party they are. The corruption is on both sides of the aisle. The corruption doesn't care what your personal politics are.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Nothing is a victory by that metric. Nothing is ever perfect, and criticizing the methods instead of the negativity is completely counterproductive.

    If you want to make the argument that people shouldn't count their eggs before they're hatched, make that argument. Don't make a different argument then chastise people for not getting what you "mean" instead of what youre actually saying.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    What are you suggesting? Because nothing short of nationwide militant revolution is going to change the facts for any country. "Both sides are the same" is the kind of rhetoric that got the US in the shit it's in now, for example. Yes, the system needs to be completely overhauled but that's not going to happen overnight. Nobody's saying strategic voting is the answer, it's making the best of a bad situation. Sometimes you need to make incremental progress by choosing the least bad option, because the alternative is worse. No, Kamala would not have been the best pick to be US president, but if you are honestly saying she'd have been the same as Trump you either haven't been paying attention for the last decade or are actively trying to disenfranchise voters. Either way, keep that shit to yourself.

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  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's nonsense, you need to keep your militant revolution shit to yourself. Protests and civil disobedience are extremely powerful motivators that can affect real change, yes, but they are not a militant revolution, and there are grassroots and progressive options for democratic change. No, the US may never lose the two-party system, but voting is not just something you do for a president, and it does not always mean simply walking into a voting booth, casting your vote and going home and shrugging if the result isn't the one you voted for.

    Desegregation and women's suffrage were both accomplished with great effort by accepting neither party's position on the issues and actively forcing a third option onto the table. This was not accomplished by simply "voting for the democratic party a bunch of times".

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    I'm not suggesting violence, I'm saying that's the only thing that would change things overnight. Lasting change takes time. Desegregation and women's sufferage didn't magically spawn a third party, they were both accomplished by years of hard work forcing the two existing parties to acknowledge them as genuine issues. Throwing your hands up and saying "they're all the same anyway" does nothing but make way for the people working very hard to make things worse.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Try telling that to Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

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