Sourcing for info on the internet’s one thing, and knowing the limits of what you have is quite the other. The mistake, I think, is to take opinions that arise out of a particular sub-culture and then collate that information for use, no matter how fundamentally flawed it is. I think it’ll be interesting to dissect a reply from Politics101 which comments on Mack Zulkifli’s post here. The above are useful for background.

From Politics101:

“It would be gullible for anyone to believe Kit was planning to use the results of the poll in its raw form and present it to parliament ala MPs” APs-style. Unless one knows for certain, one can only speculate on the form it would be used.”


This is self-evident, and therefore superficially true; we should instead be asking then what use such a poll would be to anyone at all in the first place.

“How is anyone to know Kit wasn’t trying to feel the pulse of a particular section of society, which in this case is, centre-left, middle class English-educated Malaysians. We have to note this same poll is not being conducted at his blog in Chinese.”

We don’t, and that’s Mack Zulkifli’s point: we don’t even know that the readers at LKS’s blog can be characterized as “centre-left, middle class English-educated Malaysians”; they might as well be upper class, French-native speakers from Canada for all we know. There is no option to segregate ‘income-brackets’, ‘education level’, ‘country of origin’ etc, etc, etc. And not knowing becomes the problem: any uncertainty can be turned against the findings itself.

So yes, who knows, LKS might not be using the information for parliament. Let’s say it’s for his own edification, to say nothing of his readers. So what does the poll become? A great big mutual back-slapping session? If so, let’s hope it remains at that level; we shouldn’t underestimate the incumbent, and neither should be underestimate some quarters of the reading public.

On that note, yes, we too should not overestimate some quarters of the reading public: yes there are some people who will hold as Gospel truth the results of said polls. To which, let’s consider the following:-

Whichever way one sees it, the results are about as accurate as the SMS poll conducted by ex-IGP Hanif Omar which Kit’s poll was based on. Neither poll, I am certain, was conducted with the belief that the results reflect the views of every segment of Malaysian society.

Sirs, politics is about perception, not truth. You and I may assume an enlightened position, however false it may be, but we shouldn’t trust the reading public that much, and neither should we trust all that we think is true unless tested. Which does not detract from the fact that the public may unthinkingly assume that said poll does in fact represent the current of Malaysian opinion. Would it be stupid? Yes, quite stupid. Would it happen anyway? Undoubtedly.

In sum, there are several questions on the table: that of the ambiguity of results of the poll, and that of the ambiguity of the uses of the poll. I think it’s sufficiently clear that the inherent ambiguity in the system of polling established in LKS’s blog, along with ambiguities concerning the kind of readership his blog receives, clearly allows one to refuse to accept the results of said poll and on the worst of grounds possible: that it is not representative at all, or still worse, that it is partisan.

And if partisan, what possible use could such a poll have? And I don’t think we should just restrict our discussion to the poll results, but every other statistic we wish to use when gathered from the ‘blog o sphere’. I hope people realize this, but we bloggers are living in a pond so laughably small, any talk about the “storm of dissent online” is hilarious, especially when it’s from the powers that be!

It may be a very ‘of-the-people’ attitude to say that such high, rigorous standards are off-putting to the common man, but that’s just polemics; there’s a time to be populist and there’s a time to be right.

UPDATE: more comments on polls, polling and such here.