give us your opinion about these posters

[redbreegull]

that was a quite a tortuous way of confirming for us you don't know what you're talking about

[LaBelle]

I've nearly failed math and physics many times in high school.

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

this is a lot of stupidity and ignorance in one post

idk she's doing fine until the last two sentances, most statistical models correctly predicted the actual vote tally but erred in several key states because of good turnout for trumpies and bad turnout for lefties.

stats are awesome tho, its a % chance for a reason. one of the things i think is interesting is everyone likes to go oh nate silver was wrong but nate silver himself on the eve of the election said "if trump wins it'll be because of the electoral college" and gave him a 33% chance to win. what does that mean that in 2 of 3 realities hillary is president? I don't know but its not as if they said 100% chance hillary is elected president of the world

whats extremely bad is the live statistical models, they do it with sports also and its so bad, a very bad way to present statistics

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

idk she's doing fine until the last two sentances, most statistical models correctly predicted the actual vote tally but erred in several key states because of good turnout for trumpies and bad turnout for lefties. people have a lot of fantasies about this election, the republicans have been drifting to authoritarian fascism for years now

stats are awesome tho, its a % chance for a reason. one of the things i think is interesting is everyone likes to go oh nate silver was wrong but nate silver himself on the eve of the election said "if trump wins it'll be because of the electoral college" and gave him a 33% chance to win. what does that mean that in 2 of 3 realities hillary is president? I don't know but its not as if they said 100% chance hillary is elected president of the world

whats extremely bad is the live statistical models, they do it with sports also and its so bad, a very bad way to present statistics

yes, exactly. Silver pointed out the literal exact scenario which played out as a serious possibility right before the election and people made fun of him. But most polls showed a race within the margin of error the last few days anyway. So this idea that the polls all predicted a Clinton landslide and were then upended is absolute fantasy, people just hate polls for some reason. It was the PUNDITS and the people INTERPRETING the polls who spun the info so badly.

[redbreegull]

75% of the time when people complain about polls being unreliable or inaccurate or whatever, their argument comes down to "I want a crystal ball and I don't understand why this is not it"

[redbreegull]

and the other 25% of the time stats are made up anyway

[toase]

Originally Posted by ohnoitsbonnie

Making me feel real stupid here cuz I'm not the greatest at math beyond the 8th grade level

Originally Posted by LaBelle

I've nearly failed math and physics many times in high school.

this is me.

when I'm at the bar with some friends and we need to split the bill, sometimes even the waiter looks at me expecting a quick answer since I'm half asian

[redbreegull]

I'm bad with math and science in practice, but not conceptually. You don't have to be able to design a good poll in order to understand how polling works

[vixnix]

I don't think that's true

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...ed-their-mark/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...e-us-election/
http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/1357187...nald-trump-won
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ry-fbi-clinton

I think what happened is that statistics shouldn't be used to gauge the likelihood of election outcomes - which seems like it will be considered common sense in a few years.

It's like polling people to try and predict which krispy kreme donut they'll buy when they get to the store. Sure, they say original glazed at home, because they want to seem like they have good taste and enjoy the classics and are not prone to overindulgence, but when they get there, they're going straight for the NY cheesecake, then they'll eat it while walking down the road, then turn around and go back for a second one and lie about how they forgot to get one for their friend

[redbreegull]

you've now changed your argument from something like polls aren't accurate to polls aren't meaningful, an even vaguer claim

[vixnix]

they're neither accurate nor meaningful as I clearly demonstrated with my excellent krispy kreme analogy.

[redbreegull]

they were pretty accurate in the last few presidential elections, more accurate than ever before.

whether or not they are meaningful is a subjective and philosophical question, and it is also the escape hatch through which you are now attempting to crawl

[vixnix]

I would try and talk to you more about this, but I've found that making actual sense at netphoria doesn't help slash through confirmation bias

[redbreegull]

you have done many things here, but making actual sense is not one of them

[FlamingGlobes]

[vixnix]

rbg, the guy who knows his maths so well he'll defend the use of statistics in social sciences, tells someone else they don't make actual sense

alrighty

[redbreegull]

IME when you start to lose an argument you just start spouting crazy borderline made up shit anyway, so if you are walking away from defending this unbelievably dumb opinion, all the better for everyone

[fuzzyroes]

Vix is right. Sure polls might be okay in a sense that "they're better than nothing" and they can kind of help predict the tide, but to put any serious faith in them is foolish (as most have learned with the Trump victory)

It's also funny that RBG tries to defend them by saying that ohhhhh polling said there was a 33% chance that trump could win with the electoral college.

33% and that's a good thing? That my friends is useless.

[Disco King]

Vixnix, you have to stop doing this thing where you pretend to know about something you don't know about and then get defensive (well, mostly offensive, trying to attack other people) when they call you out on it.

Just admit that you don't know shit about stats. No one will judge you. Not everybody does. Most people don't, and don't have to. Not everybody has to know about everything.

But everybody has to stop pretending that they know the things that they don't.

You speak outside your area of knowledge almost as often as Fuzzy does.

[redbreegull]

this is what I meant when I said most people who shit on polls are basically saying, "I want a crystal ball and I don't understand why this is not that"


sorry DK meant for fuzzy obviously

[fuzzyroes]

If you haven't learned from the Trump victory then you should look at Brexit. The polls were showing that Stay would easily win.

[Disco King]

Originally Posted by vixnix

rbg, the guy who knows his maths so well he'll defend the use of statistics in social sciences, tells someone else they don't make actual sense

alrighty

This is a dumb statement. It's just... it's just dumb.

Stop it now.

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by fuzzyroes

If you haven't learned from the Trump victory then you should look at Brexit. The polls were showing that Stay would easily win.

that is absolutely false. the polls were within the margin of error. it was the pundits who were convinced bremain was in the bag. I've literally had this exact argument with you at least 3 times previously. you might be incapable of learning

[vixnix]

Try explaining why it's dumb, and then we'll all get to see who is talking about shit beyond their area of knowledge

[vixnix]

in b4 "burden of proof is with you"

[redbreegull]

hey remember how we could solve the Israeli occupation by forcefully removing all 7 million Jews and housing them with their American relatives

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

It was the PUNDITS and the people INTERPRETING the polls who spun the info so badly.

& vixnix much prefers the most sensational narrative

[fuzzyroes]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

that is absolutely false. the polls were within the margin of error. it was the pundits who were convinced bremain was in the bag. I've literally had this exact argument with you at least 3 times previously. you might be incapable of learning

So what would you say on average that a poll will correctly predict an outcome that will end in a 1-10% difference might be?

Not very high I'm reckoning.

The problem is, people point to polling for "predicting" an outcome when any idiot could have predicted the outcome with common sense reasoning.

"Polling showed that Obama would win against John McCain!" it's like yeah, no shit. everyone knew that that would be the outcome.

[Trotskilicious]

unpopular people are really addicted to embarrassing themselves on this board for some reason he said knowingly

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by fuzzyroes

So what would you say on average that a poll will correctly predict an outcome that will end in a 1-10% difference might be?

Not very high I'm reckoning.

The problem is, people point to polling for "predicting" an outcome when any idiot could have predicted the outcome with common sense reasoning.

"Polling showed that Obama would win against John McCain!" it's like yeah, no shit. everyone knew that that would be the outcome.

This is the thing you do where you said something demonstrably wrong and you try to change your argument

the first sentence doesn't even make sense like wtf are you asking


and actually every conservative in this country was convinced Obama could NEVER win a second term. Guess why. PUNDITS. It's the exact same thing that happened with liberals in 2004. The belief was that Bush just couldn't win a second term and that's what people wanted to believe. The polls showed he had a good chance of winning. Liberals were shocked when he did.