And here I was thinking this was proved beyond any reasonable doubt when 4chan users spoofed the Time Magazine person of the year poll of 2009 to spell out "MARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME" by the initials of the top winners:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...

Or when Kim Jong Un won in 2012, spelling out "KJUGASCHAMBER":

https://observer.com/2012/12/4chan-successfully-votes-kim-jo...

The bit about 10% of respondents claiming they had visited the International Space Station was funny. Reminded me of this nugget[0], which for people unfamiliar with the subject doesn't mean that 20% of Jews believe in Jesus... it means that 20% of the respondents to the poll were either deranged or confused, and self-identity as Jewish for no clear reason. It's analogous to "1 in 5 vegans say they eat meat."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-for-jesus-poll-15-of-jewi...

Just a throwaway kinda funny story that's obliquely related to this. I'm not a pollster, I'm a developer. I was tasked maybe 10 years ago with creating a feedback survey that a hospitality company wanted to email to customers after their visit. It was a mix of yes/no, rate 1-5, and free writing questions, all optional.

The responses got stored in a database, as well as being emailed raw to the relevant managers. The numerical responses could be quantified and tracked over time, but there was pretty much no standard of measurement for the hundreds of thousands or millions of free writing boxes over the years.

A year ago I set up a small locally run classifier model to back test and "score" all that stuff, and to try to reveal patterns that might have been hidden.

The classifier did turn up a bunch of sets of complaints that had been overlooked by upper management. But even more so, it flooded the company with false positives of negative reviews.

It turns out that a lot of positive reviews include false-negative idiomatic expressions like "killer service" or "it beat the shit out of staying at...", which the classifier considered extremely negative.

Just a warning to anyone who thinks LLMs will help clarify the user's intent... they won't. This really makes me ponder the value of putting faith into the voodoo of the LLM's probability metrics, a la Jev. I think you may just be betting on a derivative of a fundamentally broken system, where trusting some early underlying abilities leads you to lean on a confidently presented but ultimate unsupported probability number you want to bet on, but which has no mathematical relationship to any real probability.

I cannot find the paper again, but a small group of women giving birth in the US healthcare system do self report as virgins. There is not protecting for misunderstandings or malicious intent, even in person.

From time to time we've battled multiple ideas around polling and tech within my friend circles, because there really isn't "reliable" way of knowing "what people want" when it comes to government's decision makings. It's such a hard "reach and incentives" problem, that asking for an opinion, might change the opinion itself as well, depended on the questioning. That being said, it would be cool to see real opinions of people on general matters, rather than heavily sampled versions of it.