Obviously I don’t like the political influence of opinion polls. I particularly wonder why Gallup is an outlier among Bush approval rating polls. That said, these polls are valid experiments to see how particular samples of people answer particular questions. What makes it science is that Gallup adequately documents its protocol. That’s why (as the approval rating chart shows), different polling groups roughly agree when they ask exactly the same question. That is exactly the repeatability of valid science.

But valid science is not always useful science. If you mistrust polls because people misread the results, then I agree with you.

That is quite an assumption.

Your comment misses the point. Since polls follow a scientific protocol, you can expect identical polls to yield the same results. So of course disparate results have to be due to question phrasing.

But what does it mean if you get a completely answer if you just rephrase a question? It means that the poll respondents aren’t prepared to give consistent answers. If you ask people a more personal question that they understand pretty well, like “Did you pay too much for your car?”, then the question phrasing won’t matter as much.

The lesson is that NASA shouldn’t take polls to make decisions. It should instead consider how it will be judged in hindsight.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/41/1

The full results are also available from the links in the article.

Prof. Kuperberg: while the American public may indeed not be “informed, rational, or consistent” on space policy, that alone cannot explain the widely-differing results from the two polls. Given that both polls were performed by the same company at the same time using the same sample size, when you see a difference as great as this in the results, it is logical to assume that the wording of the survey instrument may have played a significant role in the disparate results.

In the context of space policy: The public has always liked and never understood the space shuttle. Most people once accepted the lie that the shuttle is “routine and economical”; then they forgot that anyone ever said it, without recognizing the lie. It’s the same with the lie that the shuttle is an important science instrument. Most people either believe it, or don’t know that NASA claims it. Most people also know nothing about, or completely misunderstand, the safety issues that are right now killing human spaceflight at NASA by degrees. Ultimately, I don’t blame most people for not being space experts. I blame NASA and Washington for exploiting public naivete.

Meanwhile, as the shuttle sits idly on the launch pad, we see the forces of nature, engineering, and bureaucracy trump the forces of democracy. It’s the same with ever-popular missile defense. Rockets don’t fly by the will of the people.

I’d love to see a poll that asks “In terms of percentage of total federal budget, how much do you think NASA’s budget is and how much do you think it should be?”

This would give Congress numbers to know just how much they could increase it. As i stated before, local unscientific polls, that i conduct myself on lunch breaks, have that most people have no idea comparitivly how much NASA budget is.

As even these are leading questions.

That split has driven 30 years of moaning by space enthusiasts: “We the People want space, but have been thwarted by [Johnson/Nixon/social programs/tree-huggers/stingy Congress/dumb NASA bureaucy… etc etc] Apparently it would be too painful to accept that most of our fellow citizens do not, in fact, want space as urgently as we do.

It’s useful and productive to work to get the most bang for the bucks that Congress *does* provide. Or to recruit as much private investment as possible so that Congress isn’t the paymaster. Or, above all, to focus on CATS rather than flags & footprints so that wherever the money comes from, it buys more. But those are so *boring* compared to bloviating about leadership, vision, and how the real world just keeps on betraying the Timeless Primordial Outward Urge.