I think an interesting technical problem is: How can a person reliably understand the amount of consensus within the black (or any other) community for a given idea?
It's an challenging problem that could apply to any demographic group or subculture.
Any person only interacts with a portion of a demographic and thus developed biased impressions based on the slice they see. Ex. "Are black people nerdier than portrayed in the media, or is my social circle just disproportionally nerds?" or "My liberal friend group is more pro-gun more than liberal political rhetoric implies, is my friend group or the political rhetoric closer to the median liberal position?"
Currently, we have polls and extrapolation - but this system has a number of its own flaws and selection biases.
I think there would be a lot of technical and social challenges to succeeding, but building a web service that could measure community sentiment and quantify consensus more accurately than current polls would be incredibly powerful and valuable. Perhaps there is a method where you could measure the size of each tail of the bell curve (people who love or hate idea X enough to create an account to make their opinion known) to estimate the position of the mode.
It's an challenging problem that could apply to any demographic group or subculture.
Any person only interacts with a portion of a demographic and thus developed biased impressions based on the slice they see. Ex. "Are black people nerdier than portrayed in the media, or is my social circle just disproportionally nerds?" or "My liberal friend group is more pro-gun more than liberal political rhetoric implies, is my friend group or the political rhetoric closer to the median liberal position?"
Currently, we have polls and extrapolation - but this system has a number of its own flaws and selection biases.
I think there would be a lot of technical and social challenges to succeeding, but building a web service that could measure community sentiment and quantify consensus more accurately than current polls would be incredibly powerful and valuable. Perhaps there is a method where you could measure the size of each tail of the bell curve (people who love or hate idea X enough to create an account to make their opinion known) to estimate the position of the mode.