Hello!
Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a bunch of very odd and almost random decisions but also very little reflection. Luddites rejoice, this one is for you.
Also, as always, we would really appreciate any help to keep the lights on. We give away this podcast for free every week and can only keep doing it with continued donations from you. It’s just five dollars a month, which is about what you pay in delivery fees every time you order Chipotle from DoorDash or come up with some other five dollar purchase that fits in here. We do appreciate it and thank you so much to everyone who subscribed last week!
Do we really need polls?