I frittered away a good deal of my lunchtime today taking this pictorial quiz from the NY Times. It works as follows: the website displays a 360-degree snapshot of a residential neighborhood, somewhere in the US. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to size up whatever you can from the pictures: housing, yards, vehicles, surrounding area, vegetation, etc., and decide whether the precinct you are looking at went for Biden or Trump in the last election.
I looked at 20 photos. I started out on fire: had 8 out of the first 10 correct, including one or two which the vast majority of NY Times readers had missed. But then I cooled off considerably. I think I finished with 11 out of 20, which was a pretty middling (or worse) performance: I finished in the upper 75%.
I will offer one hint: it's worth waiting to see the camera rotate the entire 360 degrees before making up your mind, as some of the photos are taken from streets which have one characteristic (e.g. rural fields) on one side and another characteristic (suburban housing tract) on the other.
The newspaper apparently has over 10,000 photos available, and assuming the photos are presented to you at random, you will not be quizzed on the same photos I was.
In the course of doing this post, I took the quiz a second time, and did no better than the first time. Looks like I need to watch more HGTV!
ReplyDeleteI think they're just trying to show that you can't tell who voted for Trump by economic ranking, or possibly education. I would agree. I got 7/15 which is around coin toss.
DeleteI don't know if you read their explanatory notes. They note that most NY Times readers see an urban neighborhood and click Biden; they see a rural-looking place and click Trump; but the suburban-looking areas are really hard to figure out.
DeleteI've taken the quiz twice and haven't been shown many really-urban looking areas (like some of the Brooklyn shots they show in the explanatory article), so I feel like I'm getting a harder quiz than a lot of other readers are.
The first time I took it, I saw palm trees and said, "Aha! Florida! Trump!" and I got that right. Then, a few photos later, I saw more palm trees. I thought, "This is too easy!" and clicked Trump again. But it turned out those palm trees were in California, and Biden had won that precinct by 83 points or some such. Darn those California palms anyway.
Yeah. I tried to apply that logic. I was doing well and then I crashed and burned. I saw one that looked like a NE PA town, and clicked Trump. It was and I was right. Interesting quiz.
DeleteI didn't do very well, 7 out of 15. It said I got a "participation trophy", LOL. At first I was trying to read visual clues, like a pickup truck in the driveway or a flag hanging from the porch. But nah. Then I saw a palm tree one, and thought if it's CA, it's Biden, if FL, it's Trump. I correctly figured out that it was FL from the heavy clouds in the sky. But it was a blue precinct in Florida. So you can't tell from the visuals. Maybe that was their point.
DeleteThis has some similarity to The View From My Window contest on Andrew Sullivan's dish. Except there people have about a week to find one place but in the whole world. Of course in that case climate, vegetation, housing styles give a lot of cues.
ReplyDeleteFor this game, as they point out geography, rural vs urban, and state can give a lot of cues, however the problem comes with the swing states, counties and precincts. Lake County, Ohio went for Obama two times, but then Trump two times. The only thing that will be helpful is to know that Ohio also did the same, and that the location was Ohio
With a ten thousand sample, most games that will be played by most people are really a game of chance with scores reflecting more the luck of the draw than the skill of the participants.
I got 65% which barely put me in the top half of the players. Really it was just average (i.e. in the middle of the distribution) where one would expect to land in a game of chance.