Obama sliding in the pollsFollow

Tell a homeless guy to knock the hell out of another and he'll win a sandwich. Freakin' awesome and low cost entertainment.

Must be the "bin Laden Bump" finally fading away.

:D

Cue another ten page thread where people pretend to give a damn about Varus's blatant and rather pitiful trolling.

Just as reasonably likely that his popularity could have gone down even more than reported over the last week for all you know.

I would try hard not to break my arm patting my back if I were you.

Is that what your point was? Well dip me in sh:t and smack yo' mama. I was really confused, because it looked like yours appeared to be something completely different, what with the braggadocio and all.

So, Mr. Wizard, why is it technically not as likely that one end of the margin of error will occur as the other?

It's a yes or no question, how are there more declines permutations?

and they said~~~♫
"Aren’t you the suicide bomber?
Who blew up the bus last year?”
I said, “No,” they punched me,♪
I said, “Think logically,”
And they said, “You think logically!”
And I said, “....What!?” ♫

Um... Not to state the obvious, but the same margin of error existed, with all the same factors involved, in the previous polling results. Thus, whatever tendency for the error distribution to be in on direction more than another also existed. That cancels out, leaving us with an even likelihood of the results relative to the last measurement being higher or lower than the middle of the distribution.

Right? Step back and see the whole picture.

Care to explain yourself? Not with a link to general sites, but in your own words. It's easy to just say "you're wrong" over and over, but at some point you really should explain why you think this.

The same factors which may affect the distribution of error/deviation across a range will apply in both polls (assuming the same methodology is used for both). So if there's a tendency to under or over report something it'll be present in both. Why would you think otherwise?

I could see if we were approaching some edge of our min/max range, you could say that the distribution will be compressed, but that's not the case here. Care to explain yourself, or is this going to be another case of someone just repeating "I'm right and you're wrong" over and over?

Really? Wow. It's so great that we have a resident super-genius to tell us all how none of us can read a simple poll result properly! Thank you so much super-statistics-guy!


Wait! On second thought, I still think you're spouting BS.




You're the one claiming that it is though, right? If it were "normal", then we could simply subtract the two numbers and conclude that the poll results indicate a decrease in popularity for Obama. So now you're contradicting yourself.




You have absolutely no reason to assume this though. It's the same poll, taken by the same polling organization, using the same methodology. It's possible for the distributions to be randomly different from week to week, but that's as far as we can go here.



Ok. Here's where you go off the rails... again. Why do you assume that (the first part, not the second)? And, more importantly, why assume that for this weeks results, but not a similar factor present in the previous week? Remember, we're calculating a delta between poll results taken over time. I suppose you could say that factors have changed over that week making "popularity rises" less likely and "popularity drops" more likely, but then isn't that exactly what the damn poll tells us right off the bat?

I suspect you are way over thinking this in order to make a result not mean what it clearly means. Which is pretty darn silly in this case.



Of course I can. The president's popularity fell. See! I said it. :)

Kidding aside, I absolutely can say that the odds that the presidents popularity fell over the course of that week is greater than the odds that it increased. Which again, is the point of the poll.




No poll is perfectly accurate. I think we all get that. What's your point here? Let's just chuck out the practice of taking sampled polls for anything ever? That's kinda silly, isn't it?

Edited, Jun 23rd 2011 1:09pm by gbaji

No, you can't, at least not for that small of a difference and that large of a margin of error. Until you understand something that simple, there is absolutely no chance of you understanding the rest of my statment.


Here is a simpler example to think about:

Can you seriously not see the problem with this?

How can you write eloquent statements on the pros and cons of pulling out of Afghanistan, but fail to understand something this easy???

Gbaji,



But he's been waiting a whole week, since his last stats class, to impress us with it.

I don't know what the crazy guy muttering to himself on the street corner is talking about either. That doesn't indicate some problem on my end though, does it?