Everybody Votes Channel on the Wii

[kane_magus]

Most of the time, these are subjective things with no right or wrong answer. However, every once in a while, there will be one that deals with objective fact, with definite right and wrong choices. These always seem to be explicitly designed in just such a way as to show how uneducated people can be.

For example: "What is a rhino's horn made of?" The choices were "bone" and "hair". A rhino's horn is made entirely of keratin, which is what fingernails and hair are made of, so the correct answer is "hair" of those two choices. So, of course, 67.5% of the resulting votes were for "bone". I'm vaguely, distantly annoyed by this because it mucks up my stats as I had given people more credit than I guess I should have and predicted that "hair" would win. Oh well.

This reminds me of one of my science teachers at RCC. He asked some question or other, then asked for a vote on what we thought the answer would be. Afterward he said, to paraphrase, "My point was to show that it's pointless to allow votes on matters of fact, because those who vote one way are correct, and those who vote the other way just end up looking ignorant."

Comments

[capri-chan.livejournal.com]

Ugh, thank you. I just did a search on Google to see if anyone else was annoyed by this, and your LJ came up.

I thought this was one of those miscellaneous factoids that everyone knew, but apparently I was wrong.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Another one I recall offhand was something like "Which of these objects is visible from space?" and the choices were "Hoover Dam" and "Great Wall of China". This was another one designed to catch people, because while the Great Wall is commonly thought to be visible from space, that's mostly just an urban legend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China#Visibility_from_space). Of the two choices, Hoover Dam is the one more easily seen from space, but, of course, the Great Wall was the one that most people voted for.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Upon Googling it, apparently the original question was actually "Only one of these can be seen from space. Which one is it?" which is even worse. I remember that my reaction to this was something along the lines of "Well, I've always heard that the Great Wall was visible from space, but this sounds like a trick question. Let's ask Google. Ah... so it's not the Great Wall. Well, how 'bout that?"

And, since I expected that other people would have the same sort of reaction and then vote for the Hoover Dam accordingly, that's the one I predicted would win. Again, I gave people too much credit, apparently.

[methane.livejournal.com]

oh god, i also found this post via google for the same reason. i hadn't checked the everybody votes channel in a long while, but i had voted hair on this question, and also that the majority would pick hair.

they didn't even bother googling the damn answer before hand? it made me pretty furious; i thought everyone knew this!?!?