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Is wrong better than nothing?

December 11, 2016 By editor

Last week Italians voted “No” to constitutional reform. The Economist reports that

The 20-point margin of defeat—–60% to 40%—–was almost double what pollsters had foreseen.

Yet again, polling has failed. However, come the French and German elections next year who doubts that we’ll continue to celebrate or denounce each poll result with partisan fervor?

There’s a hunger for this kind of information and consumers will take something over nothing—even if that something isn’t telling them very much.

I recently wrote about how the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect renders a lot of human resource data next to useless—yet organizations continue to collect and act on it.

If we want things to change it seems we can’t just point out that the emperor has no clothes—we have to dress him.

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Filed Under: Data science Tagged With: polling

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