Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 21.2.2023 · 2023-02-21 · 51:17 · In Finnish

A broken election compass, a school tool nobody was meant to see, and the choice of base year — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys

Published as “Viisastelu: HS:n vääristelevä vaalikone | Sensuurikiima S2-oppilaiden tuloksista | Verovalheita!”

Hosted by: Ivan Puopolo

▶ Watch on Viikon viisasteluklubi

Sami Miettinen joined Viikon viisastelu — Ivan Puopolo’s weekly political panel, known in English here as Weekly Wiseguys — on 21 February 2023, alongside Tere Sammallahti. It was recorded six weeks before the Finnish parliamentary election, and it opens with the programme putting itself under a self-imposed election quarantine: from 1 March to 2 April, every right-wing guest would be paired with a left-wing one.

Three stories, all of them about the same question — who decides which numbers a voter gets to see.

The first is an election compass published by Helsingin Sanomat, which gave one question about gender diversity double weight in its scoring. The paper conceded the error after a candidate noticed it. The panel’s argument is about what happened next: by their arithmetic a single one-step change in one answer still moved the overall recommendation by some fifteen percentage points after the fix, while moving the value axis by three. They cite a candidate who entered his own answers and matched himself at 97 per cent rather than 100, and read out an MP’s tweet saying she could not get herself into her own top twenty. They stop short of alleging deliberate manipulation — “until some other evidence turns up, I believe it’s just bad code” — and ask instead for the code and the data to be published. Their more durable point is that the grid’s vertical axis is the wrong opposition altogether: the real pair is liberal versus authoritarian, not conservative versus green-liberal.

The second is a public-broadcaster tool comparing Finnish comprehensive schools from open official data, which politicians demanded be withdrawn. The panel’s principle — a news organisation that withholds accurate, relevant information to protect something is a poor news organisation, and the same goes for researchers — sits alongside a genuine disagreement between the two guests about what the data actually shows, and a list of the questions the data would let anyone ask: two schools with the same share of second-language pupils and different averages, what is the better one doing? Yle kept the tool up, and the panel, unusually, says so approvingly.

The third is taxation, and its best moment is methodological rather than political: the claim that the tax burden has quietly fallen depends entirely on which year you compare against. Two of the episode’s own figures do not survive a check, and this write-up marks them.

Chapters

• 00:00 — An election quarantine from 1 March: balancing the panel
• 01:37 — Guests they would like during the quarantine
• 02:25 — A running gag with the audience
• 03:11 — The three items on today’s agenda
• 03:59 — Helsingin Sanomat publishes its election compass
• 04:49 — One question on gender diversity pushes the answer to the conservative side
• 05:36 — The paper concedes the error: the question was counted twice
• 06:32 — The arithmetic that still doesn’t reconcile after the fix
• 08:06 — The correction came as a small note
• 08:56 — The error is identical for everyone — but which way does it point
• 09:45 — The wrong dichotomy: green-liberal versus conservative
• 10:31 — The real opposite pair would be liberal versus authoritarian
• 11:41 — What the compass left out: drugs, sex work, plural marriage
• 13:21 — Why the written answers matter more than the score
• 14:08 — A market-economy question settled back in the 1980s
• 15:45 — An interlude
• 16:31 — The candidate who couldn’t match himself: 97 per cent
• 17:17 — The demand: take the compass down and publish the code
• 18:04 — Päivi Räsänen’s tweet: she couldn’t get herself into her own top twenty
• 18:51 — A calibration bias, or just bad code?
• 20:26 — Many voters decide on the compass twenty minutes before the polls close
• 21:13 — Yle’s school tool: data journalism from an open register
• 22:01 — The demand to take the data down
• 22:47 — The politician’s reaction and the researcher’s duty
• 23:36 — When a news organisation withholds information it knows is true
• 24:22 — A correlation that is built into the situation
• 25:09 — More money has gone in, results have gone down
• 26:02 — The first reaction is to forbid
• 26:56 — The questions the data would raise: Swedish-as-a-second-language, peer schools
• 27:42 — “Protecting children” — from what, exactly
• 28:31 — Two schools, the same share of language learners, different averages
• 29:25 — Home-care allowance, employment and language skills
• 30:11 — The solutions go missing and the labels come out
• 30:59 — Employment through the parents — the same mechanism for everyone
• 31:54 — The Danish labour-market reforms
• 32:41 — The taxi-driver anecdote, and the limit of generalising from it
• 34:20 — Credit where due: Yle kept the data up
• 35:07 — Pressure on reporters and creeping self-censorship
• 35:52 — The Charlie Hebdo comparison
• 36:38 — Taxation: the claim that the burden has quietly fallen
• 37:25 — 43 per cent, and where that ranks internationally
• 38:15 — The choice of base year decides the conclusion
• 39:06 — What if public spending were at its 2007 level?
• 39:52 — The mantra that public spending can never be trimmed
• 40:45 — Yle competing on YouTube with tax money
• 41:34 — The details of the broadcasting tax get muddled on air
• 42:22 — Campaign talk about the economy
• 43:14 — “There’s money” and how a sense of scale gets lost
• 44:01 — Dividends, six billion, and an eleven-billion gap
• 44:49 — The kind of questions asked in election debates
• 45:39 — A slogan: money to the citizens
• 46:26 — The EU deficit rules land on the next government
• 47:21 — The pandemic and the war do not on their own explain the hole
• 48:18 — A minister’s allegedly hijacked messaging account
• 50:08 — Sign-off and a security seminar

The recording lives on Ivan Puopolo’s own channel and he owns it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. The chapter marks above are derived from the recording itself; the episode carries no published chapter list of its own.

A fuller write-up is on Neuvottelija AI, in English and in Finnish.

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