David Byler

VP at NRG | Public opinion researcher | Former @washingtonpost political data journalist | Dad, people person, math person!

[David Byler @databyler]

@sorendayton I mean that's the center-right misunderstanding the right, which is closer than what I came up with!

[David Byler @databyler]

@EggerDC Maybe so -- feels like a lot of the "wow, he uses Bible verses in his speeches!" discourse from primary season was at least adjacent to this. But we might be in a different conversation, starting last night ish

[David Byler @databyler]

@legalsaur That's not parallel though! Same side misunderstanding appeal to a target group

[David Byler @databyler]

I'm trying to think of a parallel to "Talarico went to seminary -- conservative Christians should love him!"

Is it like "Sowell was at the Hoover Institution -- liberal academics should love him!"

I'm not coming up with anything good. But I'm going for a tell that someone is enthusiastically misunderstanding the group they're talking about

[David Byler @databyler]

@TheoLandsman and, in the eyes of some evangelicals, there are seminaries that are the refuge of left wing cranks

[David Byler @databyler]

Also, post-AAPOR thoughts:
- People REALLY like using AI to code open-ends
- Using AI like normal data science makes a ton of sense (probe weaknesses, be smart, etc.)
- AI hasn't fundamentally changed the polling workflow (it prob will though!)
- There are huge practical and philosophical issues with synthetic respondents
- Some problems, i.e. weirdos disproportionately filling out surveys, prob can't be solved by throwing a bunch of AI at it

[David Byler @databyler]

late to the party -- but seriously what??? you can just leave stuff on the internet, it's not that hard

[Nathaniel Rakich @baseballot]

ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.

[Ben Welsh @palewire]

By popular demand, I've pushed a round of improvements to https://t.co/QHkMZN6uMa

- Tons of deduplications and byline cleanups
- 100s of NYT era articles
- 600+ podcast URLs
- Pub date corrections from the woolly Blogspot days

Let me know what more to fix.

[David Byler @databyler]

@LoganDobson I think that's one of the best pro-AI messages. We did some message testing on AI/environment stuff last year, and "AI will make stuff cheaper and cleaner" did better than "you are wrong about water, you dummy"

obviously not the messages we tested haha but you get the idea

[David Byler @databyler]

More AI polling where there is, at the very least, tension

[David Byler @databyler]

This is the Echelon poll and the NBC poll that made the rounds

Like in all things polling -- these are both great groups, both can capture true things, etc. It's just one of those interesting things

[David Byler @databyler]

These results are a little different. And I'm wondering why!

I have my theories, but I want to know what other people think

[David Byler @databyler]

This was really fun, as always! Be sure to listen! https://t.co/1Ea3ew1nff

And if you want exclusive poll results, on AI, in your inbox from me: https://t.co/iRmuXHc7YD

[Galen Druke @galendruke]

NEW POD: AI has officially entered mainstream politics

From Maine's first-ever statewide moratorium on large data centers passed this week, to the Anthropic/DOD spat in February, AI is beginning to disrupt politics.

@databyler and I talked about it!

[David Byler @databyler]

And I do have to give credit -- on one of those questions, I was tweaking something Tavern did earlier because it was just a great question

[David Byler @databyler]

I have a new thing on the Orange Newsletter App! It's called "Real Research on Artificial Intelligence" It's an NRG channel where I share, weekly, our original survey research on AI

Latest post: a lot of normal people think AI is a fancy search engine. And if you weigh "the destruction of your job, many humanity" against "great search" you can see why some people might be uneasy

[David Byler @databyler]

There's lots of other reasons, but that ^ is one of my working theories on the cost/benefit tradeoff at work for people

Also makes sense of people enjoying using the thing, seeing positive personal impact but being really worried about societal impact

[David Byler @databyler]

@lpmarkiewicz It did not do as well as I expected!

[David Byler @databyler]

Guys I am trying to come up with an inconspicuous but fake AI company name. For a red herring question

And every name is taken. If there is a name, there is an AI company with that name

[David Byler @databyler]

TBH am an optimist! Just trying to not be one of those guys who makes Claude his whole personality

[David Byler @databyler]

So I did a whole Claude Code thing. At least 3-5x faster than me doing it myself. It also crashed three times and got some basic directions wrong

So I got both sides of the equation in like the span of half an hour