NP: John Cage, 4'33

I posted about the Silver-Ziegler dustup a little ways back, but Nate's last word on the subject quoted himself on Politico and pointed to a great write-up in the Wall Street Journal as well.

The bit about getting stupid answers because he asked stupid questions really resonated with me, because I've written enough surveys to know that it's not as easy as some right-wing talk radio douchebag might think it is. Not unlike one of my other main aptitudes (drumming), it may seem easy to do on the surface, but it's actually quite hard to do well. I had a former colleague of mine who took over a periodic tracking survey, and made a bunch of changes that included some truly awful questions. At one point, on a conference call, he dismissively said something like "writing questions is easy," and I almost hung up the phone on him.

Writing good surveys is actually pretty gratifying, because when you write good questions, you get at what people really think, and NOT the superficial crap Ziegler put forward in his bullshit effort. I have a longstanding grudge about research designed to validate an opinion you already have that is designed in such a way that it's impossible not to. That's not research, it's propaganda. And it inevitably means stupid questions.

And that's the word. Seriously, that sort of ended like a Colbert rant, so I figured I'd finish it off like one.