• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    IMHO, I think the bigger issue is that people don’t understand statistics. They see a poll that says Trump has a 25% of winning, then when Trump wins, they think the poll is wrong. That’s not how statistics works.

    That means if you held the same close election four times, Trump would win one.

    People mock the polls, but I wonder how many of those people actually took a basic GE statistics 101 glass.

    • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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      21 days ago

      I’m not mocking polls here. I’m saying that if you have a sizeable population of people that refuse to participate in them, even if you get to a statistically significant number of people, the poll will be off. trump was also found to have been paying for polls that were slanted towards him to be put out there.

      So, if a candidate is using bad polls to flood the zone with bad results, and then on top of that you have a statistically significant number of people who refuse to participate in said polling, your data is corrupted, is it not? This is exactly how people can use statistics to lie to people.