{"id":294,"date":"2011-07-22T19:34:48","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T23:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=289"},"modified":"2011-07-22T19:34:48","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T23:34:48","slug":"the-great-pharyngulation-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/07\/the-great-pharyngulation-experiment.html","title":{"rendered":"The Great Pharyngulation Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Urban Dictionary defines the verb \u201cPharyngulate\u201d as<\/p>\n

To crash an online poll by publishing its link<\/a> so that large numbers of blog readers will make their opinions known there, often shifting the results dramatically.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The term comes from the name of P. Z. Myers\u2019 popular blog Pharyngula<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As someone interested both professionally and personally in the relationship between religion and rationality in general, and the state of popular opinion on matters related to subjects such as religion and science education in particular, I try to keep informed about efforts to survey public opinion and gather data on these questions. And so the possibility that online polls may be thoroughly meaningless is worth being aware of.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A Matrix Squiddie in PZ's Honor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pharyngulation is itself a puzzling phenomenon. On the one hand, it seems on the surface like it might significantly skew data gathered using internet surveys. On the other hand, it would seems that in theory it shouldn\u2019t be possible to pharyngulate an online poll unless either the view of the pharyngulators also reflects a majority viewpoint, or there simply aren\u2019t as many interested readers of a web site as there are readers of Pharyngula, or the vast majority of readers of Pharyngula have enough time on their hands to spend large amounts of time answering a poll over and over again (in those cases when that is even possible).<\/p>\n

So is Pharyngulation real or a myth? How does it impact attempts to gather data about public opinion? It strikes me that this blog may be ideally poised to try to answer that question, given the range of readers who represent a wide spectrum and variety of atheist, Christian, and other viewpoints.<\/p>\n

And so I thought I would try to do an experiment \u2013 to my knowledge, the first of its kind \u2013 to gauge the reality and effects of pharyngulation. And so I am setting up a \u201cpoll,\u201d which follows below. Rather than use an embedded poll, since most will not work on non self-hosted WordPress blogs, and limit the maximum number of responses, not to mention that sometimes the data gets corrupted, I am trying a simpler variation. I am posting two comments, \u201cYes\u201d and \u201cNo,\u201d and am asking you to vote by leaving a REPLY comment on one or the other.\u00a0Since Disqus counts replies to comments and lets you hide them, this will give an easy tally of the number of comments, and thus the number of votes on each.<\/p>\n

What I need you to do is to vote, and more importantly, spread the word<\/em>. If you have a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or any other way of getting a message out, please spread the word about this poll. Feel free to encourage your readers to vote a certain way. I\u2019m hopeful that maybe we\u2019ll even have the honor of P. Z. Myers telling his many readers to participate. What I\u2019m curious to find out is whether a concerted effort by many bloggers will result in a balanced outcome, or whether the experiment will in fact confirm the reality \u2013 and the power \u2013 of pharyngulation.<\/p>\n

Enough introduction. Let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n

Is pharyngulation a real phenomenon that significantly affects poll outcomes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please vote by leaving a reply comment on either my \u201cYES\u201d or \u201cNO\u201d comment below. Thanks!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Urban Dictionary defines the verb \u201cPharyngulate\u201d as To crash an online poll by publishing its link so that large numbers of blog readers will make their opinions known there, often shifting the results dramatically. The term comes from the name of P. Z. Myers\u2019 popular blog Pharyngula. As someone interested both professionally and personally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3267,5299,8592,9032,9034,9035,9307,9310],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-experiment","tag-internet","tag-p-z-myers","tag-pharyngula","tag-pharyngulate","tag-pharyngulation","tag-poll","tag-polls"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Great Pharyngulation Experiment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Urban Dictionary defines the verb "Pharyngulate" as To crash an online poll by publishing its link so that large numbers of blog readers will make\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/07\/the-great-pharyngulation-experiment.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Great Pharyngulation Experiment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Urban Dictionary defines the verb "Pharyngulate" as To crash an online poll by publishing its link so that large numbers of blog readers will make\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/07\/the-great-pharyngulation-experiment.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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