Citizen James
James42
Sr. Member
Posts: 2,540
Political Matrix
E: -3.87, S: -2.78
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« on: April 27, 2005, 08:13:27 PM » |
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Boldly going where angels fear to tread....
Firstly, a coin flip is a poor analogy for political polling. With a coin flip the odds are known.
The most frequently used analogy is a jar full of colored marbles. Say some are red and some are blue. If you pull a number out at random, you can generally get a decent estimate of what percentage total are of each color.
There are of course caviats to that. Your sample has to be truely random (which is one of the things that makes real life polling so tricky), and it's always possible that you might happen on a rare occurance. If the marbles are, say, 60% red and 40% blue you can reasonably assume that if you draw out 200 that about 120 will be red and 80 will be blue. That will not always be exact, more often it will be more like 110-130 red and 70-90 blue. It is possible, though unlikely, that you might end up pulling out 190 red and 10 blue. (I beleive this is what JJ is trying to point out).
This is where it gets tricky. In dealing with the theoretical marbles, we're assuming you know the actual percentages. With people you don't automatically assume. If you get results you don't expect you have to weigh at least three options: 1) your polling methods were flawed, 2) your poll was an outlier, or 3) your original premise was incorrect, and the actual percentages were different than what you assumed.
Of course, for the blatently partisan, they will tend to claim that any poll, or batch of polls, that say something they don't want to hear are outliers, no matter how much data piles up. (the tobacco companies kept up this front for decades) I suspect this is what Jfern is trying to say.
In any case, Isn't all the name calling back and forth a bit childish? Calling someone else a fraud just because you don't agree with their position tends to reflect rather poorly on the maturity of the attacker IMO.
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