Assumptions

Questions, facts, narratives and truth

Are you offended? You should be, but only until you realize that the question is not serious. It’s a sad illustration of the problem we need to talk about.

I have a soft spot for people doing surveys, opinion polls or serious sociological field research.
Ask me any question and I will be happy to help you by answering it. It is not an accident, it is history, and it is very personal.

When I was released from jail at 20, a condition of my parole was that I had to find a job within a week.
I did, shoveling salt for a week then mixing mortar for a month then I walked into this beautiful neoclassicist building to talk to a former teacher of mine. He was a department head in the Institute for Popular Culture.

“I have nothing for you” he said, “but I know someone who may.” He walked me over to the other side of the building introducing me to a sociologist who happened to be in a desperate need of help to meet a deadline. It was one of the luckiest moments of my life. I spent the next six years there, two as full-time staff, four as a freelancer (that paid better)
Before I went for the job hunt, I shaved my head. I wanted to look every bit the convict I was. I wanted to wear it. As it happens, in that particular place, that was not a problem.

There was a joke going around in the communist world, saying that there are three types of intellectuals: The ones who have been in jail, the ones who are in jail and the ones who will be in jail. The head of the Institute, Iván Vitányi was jailed three times before getting his position: during the war for being a communist, after the war for having born into the upper class and after 1956 for his participation in the ‘counter-revolution’. My political criminal record was more of a pedigree than a hindrance.

There were three institutions in the country doing sociological research: the one I chanced upon, the Hungarian Academy of Science and the opinion polling company of the state-owned Media conglomerate (MRT Mass-media Research Center). I ended up doing work for all three of them. They had a slightly different focus.

The media Research Center was doing standard opinion polling usually with omnibus surveys, on random samples from voting rolls, collected by an army of door-to-door interviewers.
The Academy was doing… well,….’academic’ research of institutions like education.
The most interesting, groundbreaking research was going on in my ‘home-base’ with a group of fantastic people. I could go on about all the projects, the people and the political background, but this is not the point of this post. Let me know if you want to know more about the Institute.

My full-time job title was research organizer. I did the same with most of the freelance work as well. It was a sort of project management job with a fair amount of field work included.
A sizeable part of my job was the handling of the people doing interviewing and coding.
I was the middle-man between the researchers, the field-workers doing the interviews and the coders turning it into numbers to be fed to the computers. (that was the age of mainframes running Cobol and Fortran)
Helping the design of questionnaires, making sure that they are workable, that the questions are clear and make sense for most people, that the options offered will fully capture any possible answer.
Making sure that the interviewers understand the objectives of the research and the rules of the data collection.
Same for the coders. Writing coding instructions, training, supervising quality control, etc.

We did not invent the rules. We learned them from text-books written mostly by Americans and we took them very seriously.

I do not think that dominant cultures can understand how much respect smaller cultures have for them.
I had to come to America (well, Canada) to understand that we took those rules far more seriously than the people who wrote them.

Here are some of those rules:

Closed questions must be absolutely clear
List questions MUST have an open ‘other’ option
NO leading questions, no suggestions
Each question must have standard no-answer options – I don’t know, not applicable, none of the above, refuse to answer, etc.

The point in these was to make the coders’ work straightforward and to serve as a quality control on the questionnaire. Too many non-answers, for example, would indicate a problem with the question itself.

I tried to do similar work when I got to Canada, but I gave up on it quite quickly.
It would be a long story to explain why, but I still maintained an affection for the job itself. Ask me anything and I do my best to answer. The problem is that I find it more and more difficult.

I keep starting the surveys, but the moment I get to the first question that I cannot answer honestly, I get irritated, when I come across the third, I drop it without finishing.

The ones that only give me one cliché question just to take me to a fundraiser I just delate immediately. Quite annoyingly I am getting a fair bit of those.

What triggered this post, is an Ekos survey. Once you finish a survey like this, the questionnaire becomes unavailable. I saved the questions just so that we can talk about them. It is too long to include it in this post, and I cannot possibly replicate the experience. Example:
There is a set of three questions:

Have you contracted COVID-19 at any point since February 2020?

• Yes, I tested positive for COVID-19

• Yes, I am pretty sure I had COVID-19, though I did not test positive

• No, to the best of my knowledge, I have not had COVID-19

Have you received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine?

• Yes, one dose

• Yes, two doses

• Yes, three doses

• Yes, four or more doses

• No

• Prefer not to answer

Did you experience any symptoms that lasted longer than 12 weeks that you did not have prior to getting COVID-19?

• Yes

• No

• My infection occurred less than 12 weeks ago

My answer would be “yes, no test” to the first, “no” to the second and “no” to the third.
Since this is an online survey, I should assume that the questions are branched, that for those who did get the vaccine, the third question would ask “…… prior to getting the COVID-19 vaccine” because that would be the important question…..
But I cannot know for sure.

I do not want to talk about every question in the survey, not even all the questionable ones, just the ones that best illustrate the overall problem; so here they are. My comments are bold, the questions are indented

Often in a manner that is rather confused and confusing. It is not necessarily manipulation; it can easily be confusion on the part of the people asking the questions.

When thinking about globalization, which of the following terms best describes your attitude?

• Pessimistic

• Neither pessimistic nor optimistic

• Optimistic

The expression ‘globalization is not defined. It can mean several different things.
It could mean centralization of global governance, just as it could mean liberalization of global trade.

The real confounders come in the two following questions:

There are a number of social and economic issues that Canada and the US deal with which overlap and impact the other countries. In the future, would you like to see Canada and the US develop policies independently of each other or develop integrated policies in each of the following areas?
(Ranked on a scale of seven from completely independent to completely integrated.)

• Environmental quality

• Defence policy

• Economic policies

• Energy policy

• Border security

As an old friend likes to say: “The older I get, the fonder I am of the answer: ‘it depends’”
I am trying to figure out what exactly the authors of the questionnaire were trying to find out.
Maybe just our attitude towards a closer relationship with the US? What exactly do they mean by ‘social issues’? Social media control? Unified censorship policies on those platforms? The following questions may offer a hint:

Disinformation is false information that is deliberately intended to mislead. Overall, how serious do you think the issue of disinformation is?
Answer is on a scale of five from not at all serious to extremely serious.

Followed by this question:

To what extent do you believe each of the following is occurring in Canada due to disinformation?
(Answer is on a scale of five from ‘not at all’ to ‘a great extent’)

• Less trust in public institutions

• Individuals making harmful health decisions

• Economic disruptions (such as increased market volatility, reduced consumer confidence, etc)

• Reduced ability to find a common ground when creating a national agenda

• Canada's democracy being under threat

• Less mutual trust between Canadians

Do I even need to comment? This is a desperate cry of officialdom losing control. This list is so desperate, that it could have come straight from the mouth of Justin himself! With his signature sigh between each item. Just close your eyes and imagine it!

To what extent do you believe each of the following is responsible for the spread of disinformation in Canada? (Same scale as for the previous question)

• Average citizens

• Social media influencers

• Foreign governments

• Special interest groups

This is when I realized what is the most likely point of this ‘survey’, but let me share with you a few more questions before getting to that. Governments, their institutions and officials, politicians, the mainstream media supranational organizations (like the WHO) are strangely missing from the list.

There has been a lot of talk lately about interference by foreign governments in Canada. Interference can include cyber espionage to obtain sensitive information from governments and corporations, but also "influence operations" such as manipulating information, deliberately spreading disinformation, and exerting pressure on Canadian officials and targeted Canadians. To what extent do you believe foreign interference is a serious threat in Canada? (same scale of five as above)

To what extent would you say the issue of foreign interference in Canada has gotten better or worse over the past five years? (scale of three from worse to better)

Now, just think about it! How could an average citizen know anything about it? All they can know is the fake outrage from the media shills on the subject. The only point of this question is to find out how effective the media circus was trying to whip up some frenzy about it.

To what extent do you believe each of the following governments is conducting interference operations in Canada? (scale of five)

• The United States

• Russia

• China

• India

• Iran

The sleazy, manipulative nature of this particular question would deserve a post on its own. What is ‘interference’ anyway? Interference with what?
When Trump is dissing or mocking Trudeau, is that interference? How about sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on his back?

To the best of your knowledge, are the following statements true or false?
(Scale of four from completely false to completely true)

• Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine

• Canada's GDP growth is well below the average for G7 countries

• More Canadians have died from COVID-19 vaccines than from the COVID-19 virus itself

• Deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines are being intentionally hidden by governments

• Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary cause of climate change

This is the best question of the survey. Its point is to weed out the ‘conspiracy theorists’ like I, and most likely YOU, are judged to be.

This survey has nothing to do with any real question, it was not designed to understand popular sentiments or anything else for this matter. Its most likely purpose is to create a pretext and formulate policy for a major crackdown on free speech and social media exchanges by providing a ‘scientific’ foundation for it and to create a narrative to justify the policy.

Propaganda in the Stalinist phase of communism was simple. The party created the official narrative that everybody was expected to internalize without question. It was based on ideology so it had to be correct.

I was growing after Stalin’s death, in what Khrushchev called “Goulach communism” where thinking communists were trying to understand why the system was not working as expected. The PARTY was trying to understand it, that is why they allowed (and financed, of course) the Institute I was working for.
The research there was genuine. Being part of that was one of the most rewarding periods of my life.
I wrote about one of the projects I was working on in Attawapiskat kulturni dom

What we have today in this neo-communist, postmodernist world is just utter cynicism. Shameless manipulations and distortions of facts, newspeak and doublespeak.
There is no interest in knowledge and understanding.
The truth doesn’t matter, only the quest for power does.

…and, btw, in case you missed it, the point of the picture on the top is that for surveys like this, with the assumption is that we are all idiots

I lifted this meme from

Who is Robert Malone

’s Sunday funnies which alone worth the subscription to his Substack.

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References

EKOS Research Associates Inc.