Bonds Indicted, Newsom Re-Elected, Patriots Win 2007 Superbowl: SF Weekly Sees Future
The SF Weekly just got back from a tour of the future, courtesy of the newfangled Future’s Market, which uses the idiocy of the crowd to make predictions about current events. Here’s your market report:
2007 SF Mayoral Election goes to: Newsom!
Gay marriage in CA.? No way.
Gays in the military? Nope.
Oakland’s trash lockout? Resolved by August 1.
When will Bonds hit record home run? August.
Who wins the 2007 Superbowl? The Pats. (Fuck!)
Who will be the master chef that wins Hell's Kitchen?
Rock.
Reasons not to trust the market: It totally whiffed on the Maze Meltdown fix.
And totally underestimated the iPhone's 200,000 plus sales.
Besides being a naked ploy to draw consumers to the ABC brand, ABC7’s Futures Market exemplifies an unfortunate trend for questionably-crafted opinion polls to supplant informed criticism and reasoned debate, and enthrall editors ...
and politicians alike by the implicit threat: fail the popularity contest, and you’ve lost the game.
Where polls achieve that level of influence, it becomes important who’s asking the questions, and how they define the terms. The Futures Market forum presently doesn’t offer any fresh perspectives, but seems to recycle the “issues” promoted by broadcast news and echoed in stagnant televised “debates,” which are also frequently limited to yes/no and multiple choice questions. The numbers generated by this exercise are presently not really useful, except maybe to the pollsters and consultants who define those issues. It’s pretty incestuous.
As a one-time San Franciscan, noted both for his popularity and reputation as an independent thinker, was fond of saying [http://www.twainquotes.com/Statistics.html], “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” ABC7's Futures Market is all fun and games as long as decisions about what makes the news are crafted elsewhere.
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