• FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Last time I mentioned that poll, people tried to come up with all kinds of reasons to discredit it. Reasons that the poll explicitly stated how it accounted for them.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The point of the poll is to see how things are tending, not to see how the election will happen 10 months from now. You’re just another person trying to discredit what you don’t understand.

        • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s a bold statement for someone putting so much stock in the implications of 11 month pre-election polling.

          You should really comment less on shit you don’t know about, you’re embarrassing yourself.

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Okay, feel free to ignore the polls and reap the consequences of that. Remember when the trends of polling was ignored in 2016 and how that turned out?

            You should really comment less on shit you don’t know about, you’re embarrassing yourself.

            Projection

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yup and they just disagree with arbitrary opinions they think are factual and downvote without consideration of how statistics work. If they respond with data it’s some very niche thing extrapolated way beyond it’s significance. Ultimately it’s downvoting what they don’t want to be true as what happens on all social media.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Have you seen people taking statistics classes? It’s almost universally hated because, for some reason, people struggle with it. I really enjoyed it because it’s probably the most practical form of math you can take. I was only one class away from getting a minor in statistics, but wasn’t going to take an additional semester just for that minor.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I really enjoyed my stats classes. It was a lot of really great information and general knowledge.

          I do think having that background makes me simultaneously more and less trusting of polls. The recent performance of polls in the midterms and across various races this year are quite surprising to me. They haven’t done a good job of capturing the abortion backlash trend against Republicans.

          There would have to be a reason however for their deficiency, and that’s where the stats background is helpful. I’m not going to baselessly dismiss polls because I dislike the results, I need reasons. And the best explanation I can think of is the simple random sample. The people they’re polling don’t constitute a true SRS, because I wager there’s some conflating factor skewing results. Landlines are going to favor older populations. Texting people to take polls is going to have the bias of who actually goes on to take them.

          The biggest enemy to statistics is that there’s no law forcing people to answer questions if they’re chosen for a poll.

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Landlines are going to favor older populations

            Sure, but look at the polling method. They used landlines and cellular.