VP at NRG | Public opinion researcher | Former @washingtonpost political data journalist | Dad, people person, math person!
Joined September 2014
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Also while I'm throwing random stuff around, it really does seem like the Jacob Coxon thing was a real shift in how AI politics looks
also these numbers are all pretty high/positive bc people tend to count talking about capabilities/efficiencies in daily life as positive news (something that came out of an OE follow-up!)
as a highly engaged, high information voter -- doing my part for differential non-response by not taking any of these surveys
...unless a certain type of republican is responding too much and another type is not, and it's not a trait that you can measure and fix with weights
this has always been either the fear or the problem (depending on which election you're in)
I will send results out on the NRG substack later this week. But when we asked which lab was doing the most on safety, the leading answer was "No AI company is working towards safety"
🙃
It's weird that we all set pre-election expectations then grade the parties on it
We could just eliminate this step in mid-Nov and assess how well parties did compared to fundamentals, what tactics worked, etc
Like why do takes in mid-Oct with partial info figure into final assessments
this is one of my forever beefs about 2022 fwiw
Rs had advantages, but blunted them with 1) Dobbs (something they wanted forever) and 2) bad candidates (true unforced errors there) and a small win in the house and generally worse results than they could have
but the whole story somehow revolves around how the results departed from what the conventional wisdom was according to some R-sponsored polls that dropped in october
exactly! and the joke comes from the Saddam Hussein + Cheesecake Factory image juxtaposition
if Obama had said "Cheesecake Factory is UGGGGLLLYY and OMG TRUMP LIKES IT!!" it would not be funny and remind me of a lefty influencer trying to get hate clicks
I feel like this is not that hard to get?
barely related tangent
i think everyone basically wants to run against the influencers on the other side. bc influencers are obnoxious, say totally insane things, have incentive to get views not votes, etc.
sometimes the electeds/pols feel/act/talk like influencers and it all works out and makes sense.
but i think this ^^ impulse is part of why political debates can feel only semi tethered to elections sometimes
David Byler retweeted
Polling is like democracy, it’s the worst one except for all the other ones
Polling always survives this stuff bc it's unique
There is no other reliable way to
- ask an arbitrary question
- of giant, complicated population
- get a representative answer
- relatively fast, any time
Survey data isn't perfect. But, for a lot of purposes, it's the only game in town!
if you built up any sort of a public profile prior to 2025 -> that might end up being a really helpful "I truly do know things / am not a fraud" flag for a while
re wedegewood -- more vetting is a good idea and my best bet is that it'll help! but it'll be really really hard to stamp out frauds/fakes in so many areas, given no guardrails social media + AI letting anyone just spin up things
as someone who has spent *many* hours wrangling polls off the pages of RCP (while there and after!) this button makes me so happy 🥲
