When Is a Creationist Not a Creationist? Appreciating the Miracles of Public Opinion Polling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research report re-examines the claim made by the National Post newspaper just prior to the 2000 Canadian election that Canadians are split virtually down the middle on the merits of creationism versus evolution. Based on new data collected for the purpose, the authors argue that the original research likely overestimates the proportion of the population subscribing to creationist views. Moreover, they suggest that the nature of the question asked in the original research accounts for this overestimation. Finally, they argue that the increasing use of public polls for advocacy as well as descriptive purposes makes it imperative that the media and the public become more sophisticated in their appreciation of how the medium can affect the message.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.080 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".