I’m not often disposed to take online surveys, but when I received a survey from The Atlantic on how large corporations are perceived by the public, I was intrigued. Why was this magazine polling its readers about large corporations?
The Atlantic got its start in the mid-1800s as a literary magazine, with Emerson and Longfellow among its founders, but has morphed into a political and cultural magazine that tries to present a balance of topics from the right and the left and to position itself as a feisty maverick. It’s hardly the New Yorker–the nonword snuck has sneaked in more than once, and one “writer” touted discarding the object pronoun whom–but to the extent that one can trust a nonhuman entity to do its best to be accurate, I do. Or did.
If you are over 50, you may remember a time when corporations served four stakeholders: employees, community, customers, and shareholders. Hard though it is for you younger folk to believe, many large corporations actually tried to compensate their employees fairly, contribute to the well-being of their communities, and deal honestly with their customers. Then in the 1980s, corporate focus moved to shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations. Now most people instinctively mistrust large corporations, with good cause.
The questions on this survey concerned the perceived trustworthiness of a specific list of very large banks and investment houses and their leaders, and how much they care about people and local communities. My answers ranged from low/little to none/not at all. That is, until my survey was interrupted by this:
Really? I think it meant to say, We are trying to confirm a pre-determined assumption, which you are not doing, so we are going to eliminate your input.
Last month I learned about alternative facts. This month, I have seen alternative data.
Culminating Triad 
I can’t help but wonder if this survey was really somehow linked to some sort of advertising mechanism and not to a research study of peoples’ perception of big banks. I do share your concerns though!
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No, no, Jane C has it right. Too many of the Atlantic’s readers have exactly your point of view, and they wanted to know more about people with a different point of view. They’re doing research, maybe “market” research or maybe research-research. Kind of like trying to understand why people voted for Trump. It’s not really weird and sinister, other than in the way that all market research is, but that’s the world we live in. The other choice would be for them to not tell you that your survey didn’t count.
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Was your interruption signed by George Orwell?
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Alternate data. I like it.
Of course, they could be looking for some other distribution. For example, say you want to find out what people in various countries think of colors and sizes for bactrians. Then you might take surveys in a lot of countries, asking what they think of bactrians of various hues and bulks. You would get a lot of answers from arabic speaking countries, quite a few from Australia, but not that many from, say, Greenland or Iceland. Since you want to know conditional probabilities, say P(big and purple | C) for each country, you could treat each country as a separate sample, and use statistical methods to know how many samples you need to get a statistically valid result. When you had enough responses from Libya you might cut them off until you had enough responses from everywhere.
I would think you would not tell the Libyans that you were ignoring their preferences, though. I would think you would thank them effusively and then toss the data.
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I agree that’s very weird and sinister, but here’s an alternative (!) interpretation: maybe the survey was really about how people with a certain view of major corporations feel about something else? The opening questions in a market research-type survey are often “prequalifiers” the purpose of which is to ensure the survey captures a representative spread of respondents across a certain set of characteristics. It sounds like your survey was looking for a set of people who had a range of attitudes about major financial institutions, and they were having trouble hitting their quota!
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