LOL....now I'm a bit confused 
My application has 4 LDRs in a typical voltage-divider arrangement with a 5K resistor, connected to pins A0 - A3. The analog reference voltage is the default 5 volts, and it does not change throughout the sketch. They are typically read sequentially, with no commands or pauses between the readings.
It appears to work fine. The pin values are mapped from 0-1023 to 0-100, and they are pretty steady. This all is connected to the MCU with an 8' shielded cable, so obviously, there is some increased capacitance, but it doesn't seem to bother, as near as I can tell. I'd like to connect a 1M pull-down resistor to each of the 4 analog pins so that if a wire is broken, the pin will be pulled close to 0 volts rather than floating.
Is the pull-down a good idea? Should I do something different in the sketch with the readings, such as take average multiple readings, or discard the first reading of each pin, on each iteration? In the sketch, the readings are taken, compared, and motors are switched on or off on each iteration of loop(), so I'd like to keep it reasonably fast, to avoid overshooting the target. There are also 8 flags and 4 timers that are checked in the loop.