For almost two years now polls in Canada have shown that the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Pierre Poilievre, Canada's answer to Donald Trump, have a commanding lead over the governing Liberal Party led until recently by Justin Trudeau. There is no doubt that this was a major factor leading to Trudeau's resignation, in the hope that the Liberal Party might recover lost ground under a new leader.
At the same time, I can't help feeling that the polls have a lot of influence on how Canadians will vote.
I wrote a thread on Mastodon about how this might work. The Conservative Party's messaging consists simply of repeating “Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. This is spread both by conventional media and corporate social media as news and commentary.
Then one day you get a phone call from a polling company asking whether you agree that Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. What are the odds that you will say yes, if you've been exposed to the statement repeatedly?
Polls are viewed as representing the most probable outcome of an election “if it were held today”. But that probability is only conditional. It is the probability that you will vote one way or another given that you've been exposed to a certain propaganda. I am sure that if in a parallel universe where the Conservative Party of Canada has not been hammering the message about Trudeau for years a similar poll was conducted, the result would be quite different.
But there's more. The poll itself has an influence on the election outcome. One reason is what is known as “social proof”. Gil Duran has a great post about this in The Framelab. He writes
People tend to copy what other people do. If something is popular, we tend to trust it more. When many other people buy a product or follow a trend, we tend to assume it’s good. Our brains are wired to look for clues from other people’s choices. It’s a basic human instinct to follow the crowd. “Monkey see, monkey do.”
If you see that a majority of your fellow voters will vote Conservative, you are more likely to do so yourself. Marketers know this very well.
The poll may also have another effect on the outcome of the election: If you are not a Conservative voter, but you are convinced that the Conservatives will win, that makes you less likely to take the trouble to vote. The poll becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I see propaganda as a process, where a certain political message is spread to as many people as possible and then polling is a feedback mechanism that confirms that the message is true. Polling skeptics will scrutinize the methodology and the statistical methods, and I have been one of them, but I believe now that that is missing the point. The polls can be quite accurate in that they reflect popular opinion, and yet be a key component of the propaganda process.
OK, been playing Satisfactory since December 25th, when I got it as a Christmas gifts.
I'm struggling in the game. I think I hit the mid-game blues, and it's just frustrating at this point. I tried to do the Ficmas event, but because I was new, I didn't have the equipment to make what I needed to make. So I had to pause, work on getting the machines, then restart the ficmas stuff. The dependency trees are kind of obvious. How to work around terrain, less so. I've run into dependencies I can't do anything about, like mycelium. The first branch in the mycelium research tree is 5 mycelium. Guess how much I got the first and ONLY time I found mycelium in the game? Yep, 4.
I recently upgraded my scanner to find enemies, and now I'm too scared to actually explore. I don't know why-- I was relatively fearless before. I finally sneaked around till I found an impure quartz node so I could work the quartz research tree. I'm about 50 game days in (hard to tell-- I died twice.)
I see pics and videos of really gorgeous Satisfactory setups, and I'm so impressed. And then mine?
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OK, been playing Satisfactory since December 25th, when I got it as a Christmas gifts.
I'm struggling in the game. I think I hit the mid-game blues, and it's just frustrating at this point. I tried to do the Ficmas event, but because I was new, I didn't have the equipment to make what I needed to make. So I had to pause, work on getting the machines, then restart the ficmas stuff. The dependency trees are kind of obvious. How to work around terrain, less so. I've run into dependencies I can't do anything about, like mycelium. The first branch in the mycelium research tree is 5 mycelium. Guess how much I got the first and ONLY time I found mycelium in the game? Yep, 4.
I recently upgraded my scanner to find enemies, and now I'm too scared to actually explore. I don't know why-- I was relatively fearless before. I finally sneaked around till I found an impure quartz node so I could work the quartz research tree. I'm about 50 game days in (hard to tell-- I died twice.)
I see pics and videos of really gorgeous Satisfactory setups, and I'm so impressed. And then mine? Mine looks like this:
Just absolute spaghetti. Anyway, I know I'm just complaining, but what is the Internet for but to whine about video games, right?
I think I'm going to put this one down for a while and do something more productive with my time, like eat yogurt or burn things.
Starting to explore migrating away from corporate social media like Facebook or Twitter, to the fediverse. The biggest obstacle is of course the network effect: I have a group of friends on Facebook, we all follow each other, will they migrate with me? I guess I'll find out. I am doing this gradually, first migrating to the fediverse (links in my profile), and starting a blog at write.as/leastaction/ with some longer pieces about topics that interest me: the meaning of democracy is a big one for me these days. And yes, the rise of oligarchic despots around the world.
If any of these things resonate with you, do let me know. I am very happy to have conversations about these important topics.
What's a good app for this on android? I'm currently using fedilab but I don't like having mastodon using the same app as this for autism related reasons.
I'm very new to this (as of yesterday, actually 🙈), and I found this page listing some mobile clients.
I'm experimenting with using the "Raccoon for Friendica" (via F-Droid), and also the one you're using, "Fedilab". I'm still learning to navigate, so I'm also using Firefox ("Add to Home page") from my smartphone (this is from desktop, though). Maybe the last one is worth a try for you - just go via a web browser?
I can't believe this is the global server and it's only like a couple hundred people here. I love it though, growing tired of the massive metaverse. Greetings from around the middle of the Europe! 👋✌️
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