| I heartily approve of this excellent statistician rant. That said, I ask you: Why do these polls keep happening, even though "everyone knows" that they are statistical garbage? I assert that they are a sign, a sign of a serious problem with online media (or with HN, at any rate): We are standing in a virtual room with a large crowd of people, and we can't see any of them, and it's very disconcerting. My monkey brain wants to know who's there in the formless darkness. So we send out these statistically-primitive sonar pings in the form of polls. You will learn one thing from this poll: That for any age group, there are some people here who are happy to claim membership in that group. And that is comforting. We're diverse! We're like a real family! The poll is a feel-good experience, the way It's a Wonderful Life would be if it had been written by actuaries. You could usefully replace most HN polls with a simple icebreaker question ("Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm 37, and I'm wondering who is out there") except that such questions don't scale well (nobody actually wants to read the 2,000 responses) and they're kind of at odds with our local culture (which is about keeping in-band social niceties to a minimum, again in an attempt to scale well). So it turns out to be more socially acceptable here to pretend that you're taking a poll, even though polls on HN are utter nonsense. The clipboard and the questionnaire are a prop designed to help start a conversation. Anyway, back to the real matters at hand: A) I have just turned forty. There are people here older than me. There are many here younger than me. B) Now we know why most social media has those profile pages with the little pictures and bios, and (e.g.) the real reason why IMVU is a success. |