Postavant

However, pollster organization Strategic Vision certainly is. Leave it to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver to tear down this “polling service” not once, not twice, but three times after they ran that story about how only a small fraction of Oklahoma high school students knew who the first President of the United States was. Of course, there were a few things that just seemed wrong when I first reported it, but the mix of cynicism, misanthropy, and a 67% vote for McCain in the state made me shrug it off…much like everyone else did when they reported this. Fact is, when 0% of the 1,000 kids who took the test get 8 or more questions right, I should have realized that there are kids who would grow up to be hipster lesbian comedians like Cameron Buchholtz in Oklahoma who would get these, and…I’m a sucker for sensationalist news. I need more faith in people.

Turns out Strategic Vision, who was rather mediocre in its 2008 Presidential polling, always sort of in the middle of all their numbers, are a big giant crock of shit and nobody really decided to call this out until FiveThirtyEight, my former homepage back when the numbers were so plentiful and important, looked into it further. The numbers didn’t add up at all to any statistical standard, and it appeared as if they just made them out of thin air (you can just go to the links a paragraph above to dive further). Then it was discovered that they were lying about being an Atlanta based firm, instead they’re just in some small rural town and they harass any major publication that tries to point out what big crocks of shit they are. That’s right, this is just one big scheme.

I wish I was that good.

But I still give them credit for probably being right on with their Arizona numbers, http://www.abc15.com/content/news/phoenixmetro/central/story/Study-Most-Arizona-students-wouldnt-pass/vAiAFR9bbkuBbiXCgIYW2Q.cspx

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Tags: ABC 15, Atlanta, Constitution Day, FiveThirtyEight, follow up, Nate Silver, oklahoma, Strategic Vision, test

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