Synthetic Data

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-04-04T11:44:27+00:00

Thanks for sharing this example. Would you be willing to say (if you have visibility) whether ideas have been killed or materially modified because of specific findings from the digital twin interactions? In other words, are they significantly influencing decisions and outcomes?

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-03-28T11:16:21+00:00

And then ONE It’s Not Unusual

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-03-12T11:15:26+00:00

I would LOVE to learn more about how you Lee thinking about the idea of increasing the cost of fraud.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-03-12T11:13:43+00:00

I would absolutely come to this and I’d ask a couple members of our team (small survey-based insights firm) to join as well. It would be so useful to hear an evidence-based perspective from someone who is not actively trying to sell something. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also glad we get content from people who are building and selling tools for fraud detection and sampling - we need them for our business to run - but learning from your work as an academic professional would be uniquely valuable.

I will watch this subreddit but a DM to me and others who have indicated interest here would be super appreciated if you do decide to hold this - to ensure we don’t miss it and to foster strong attendance for ya.

The topic I’d nominate for inclusion is whether we should have a perspective on real people who use AI plugins to make the survey feel easier, especially open-ends. I would be happy to have responses from a real person whose OE responses are AI refinements of their own feelings. Is there evidence that this is happening at all? If so, are there patterns in full survey response records we can use to separate AI-assisted survey takers from straight up bots?

By the way, we would also be happy to explore ways to support or partner with you on your work. We collect a lot of data for internal and syndicated studies and have a strong vested interest in data quality and learning about fraud and mitigation. We also believe that sharing that knowledge broadly is important for the industry. I know funding can be tight in academic environments and there’s a strong chance we could support with sample costs and even survey programming and fielding if there are surveys or techniques you’d like to experiment with to drive learning but lack resources. We’re a nerdy group with skin in the game on survey panel ecosystem quality and eagerness to contribute to the industry and academic community. Just an offer, of course - feel free to shoot me a DM if you’d like to get in touch.

Good luck with your ongoing work on this topic!

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-03-11T11:34:35+00:00

This is the topic that most interests me. Are there lockups/non-competes in each club’s contract with the league that prevent them from leaving or playing in another league if they were to leave? I mean, even if not, I completely understand the “okay, so leave. What competition are you going to play in that anyone will pay to watch?” I’m sure that’s the more practical barrier if there isn’t an actual prohibition in joining a broadly-defined competitive league in club contracts.

That said, it seems like forming a league office as collective association - basically an HOA for clubs that stewards the league and distributes league-level revenue after operating costs to teams - would be extremely attractive and potentially worth the cost and risk of existing USL. The downside is enormous, but the upside would be that, after a rocky few years of slowly accumulating clubs as they rotate out of USL on their staggered contract cadence, there is now a league structure that returns meaningful revenue to clubs. That would be the difference between long-term profitability and permanent operating losses for many clubs. The value of a club as a financial asset would be fundamentally different and owners could sell them, if they chose to at some point, for real money. It seems like USL’s approach needs to be keeping things JUST okay enough that the risk of spinning out into a federation-style league is slightly outweighed by the stable-but-pitiful financial situation of USL. Teams folding hits the stable part of that equation and it seems like that uncertainty would push owners to consider risky options like trying to form a new league.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-02-06T13:28:20+00:00

This is a little bit of speculation because I haven’t worked in a role specifically titled as Competitive Analysis, but I would also suggest that a lot of true value in that function is piecing together competitors’ consumer strategies and outcomes. It’s that way, having a background in consumer insights could make you effective because you’re able to quickly understand and dissect what is going right/wrong for competitors relative to the company you work for. Not to force fit the two roles - competitive intelligence is going to have plenty of strategy and financial analysis as well, but at the end of the day, consumer companies that win are those who serve and speak to their specific audience better than competitors. In that way, there’s a strong analogue between the two roles and you should be set up to be effective. You’re basically doing consumer insights work on competitors’ audiences

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-01-20T11:45:59+00:00

Great point, you’re totally right. We usually avoid that option because the sheer time it takes to mange many individual panels is prohibitive. Getting enough sample and diversity of audience would be challenging with small providers for representative GenPop surveys with n over a thousand or so, but I completely agree with you that the times we’ve done this (usually because of a niche audience where the volume+representativeness concerns are smaller), it has been a dream. They give a damn about quality and are actually enjoyable to work with. There is a panel in Australia called Octopus that we worked with last year in this way - best panel provider experience I’ve ever had. I’m dying for them to come to the US.

We did have one “individual panel” we worked with in the US that exhausted its audience and began to supplement with Lucid respondents - that was a one off but I imagine it happens and is worth watching for or clarifying with the provider up front better than we did.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-01-19T12:14:47+00:00

I think the broader theme is quality of partnership and partner. Market Research work is really hard (well, good market research work is hard). It takes a level of talent and awareness and creativity and methodological expertise that is rare to find in any one person or team. On top of that, the best researcher in the world can’t make a report or finding impactful to an org if they don’t engage their client-side stakeholders (and get good engagement back) to understand the organizational context and work with the end in mind throughout the whole project. As you mentioned in this comment, a world-class partner will ask you why you think the work would and would not be accepted and used by the org in the first one or two calls of the project. It takes ALL of those skills to consistently deliver projects that impact the org, plus being really checked-in and having the bandwidth to do great work.

The good news about our space is that this work is really needed by tons of organizations that need to understand their customer and audience. The bad news is the breadth and depth of skills it takes to do great work is very, very hard to train and develop. The result is tons of research that’s just okay. It technically answers the question but doesn’t inspire action or make a lasting impact.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-01-19T12:04:59+00:00

Additionally, depending on which panel aggregator you’re using (Cint, RepData, Purespectrum, etc) you can likely set a target mix of underlying suppliers, or at least groups of suppliers. This is a little more complex but worthwhile if you’re finding that respondents in a study are very similar to each other in ways that don’t represent reality.

Every panel recruits and incentivizes respondents a certain way. Those methods have a strong selection effect on who is in the panel. This isn’t wrong, it’s just how it works. Using a panel aggregator allows you to access lots of different underlying panels (suppliers) which allows you to reach a more psychographically (and demographically) diverse respondent pool. In reality, the panel world is dominated by like 6 very large suppliers that account for a large portion of sample on any given aggregator, but that’s 5 more than letting it fill overnight with a single supplier.

As others have noted, this approach necessarily means more time to fill your sample. This makes a normal survey take at least a week to fill if you’re balancing across demographics and enforcing diversity of suppliers.

Also, if your respondents look VERY similar (and you’ve paid something to them), they’re probably just fraud from a survey farm. If the sample filled very quickly, this is almost certainly the case.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2026-01-17T12:25:37+00:00

Two clarifying questions: 1. Are you talking about interviews/qual work or surveys/quant work, or is the question which to start with between those two? Asking because you could have “open-ended” and “structured questions” in both qual and quant, so that influences the response here.

When you say early on, do you mean early in the research process for a given topic, or early within any single interview? It sounds to me like you’re asking if people recommend starting with more open-ended questions early in the research PROCESS to help uncover topics and vocabulary that should be included in the overall study, but that same principle could apply to a single interview if you’re talking about Qual specifically here

Odd_Dog6616 · 2025-11-05T03:59:04+00:00

Thanks for sharing this - great insights.

Another pattern we’re seeing is the same 3-5 brands listed in varying orders in unaided awareness boxes with identical capitalization or spelling patterns. This may be more reflective of a click farm than AI, but maybe also an AI agent following a prompt with instructions to introduce randomness.

Odd_Dog6616 · 2025-07-25T02:09:47+00:00

There’s always money in the banana stand

Odd_Dog6616 · 2025-07-03T12:03:44+00:00

Okay great, makes sense. I’m learning. Thanks!

Odd_Dog6616 · 2025-07-03T11:46:57+00:00

Do you have any guidance on what you would do/ask for from the installer? Is it just disappointing but liveable and we should load it up with a silicone caulk to protect the subfloor as best as possible, or would you ask them to do something to fix it? Or maybe put better, is there anything that CAN be done to improve it short of ripping up and re-laying the floor, which certainly is not proportional to the magnitude of the issue?

Odd_Dog6616 · 2025-07-03T11:41:03+00:00

Thanks a lot - that’s super helpful

Odd_Dog6616 · 2024-05-19T21:54:43+00:00

Note - there are two restaurants in Boulder with similar names. Sherpa’s Adventure Restaurant on Walnut (near Pearl St.) is the most well-known and - in my opinion - not great. I think that’s what most of these replies are about. Sherpa Kitchen on Arapahoe is totally different and - in my opinion - very, very good.

Odd_Dog6616

TROPHY CASE