Re: better health through internet opinion polls?

Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:20:00 -0800

Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko wrote:

> ...This is also a problem with physical voting: people who show up
> at the booths are in many ways different from people who don't
> show up, and so the votes are always, to some [unknown] degree,
> non-representative.

alexander, this is driven home to me every time i go to the voting booth.

my neighborhood, and my city (milpitas california) is half asian, ~8% nonwhite
nonasian, ~15% other. but if you go vote, and look around, most of the people (~80%) are over-50 anglo. i dont know where all the middle age
anglos live. i never see them except on voting day.

> The question is, is the society really interested in finding
> better ways to realize people's interests...?

yes, *i* am damned interested in that. i want to use it for finding correllations between lifestyles and medical conditions, as the extropian veterans are so tolerantly tired of hearing me state. there is an outfit called "votebot" in which you can submit questions and they make a poll out of it and send it out to volunteers. again, it may not be representative, but for what i want, it doesnt need to be. search yahoo under "votebot". spike