Signal & Noise

The fight over four, five or seven points is a proxy for a harder question: is a neutral answer real information, or an escape hatch we should take away?

For decades the honest answer to "what do you think?" cost too much to read at scale. That arithmetic just flipped, and it is quietly changing what a survey looks like.

For most of the web's history, surveys never had to prove a respondent was human. Now they do — and the obvious test stopped working.