Jim Bramlett - Powered by InJesus
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Jim Bramlett
Oct 28, 2004
Dear friends:
We are being swamped with polling results about the coming election -- at least eight major polls. In a neat service, they are being averaged by http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls.html
But if you do not know so already, please know that polls are notoriously fallible and often wrong, in spite of how they are presented as "scientific." They are almost worshipped by the media, which even allow them to determine what is right and wrong and what is truth and not truth. Polls have become idols in our culture. You want to know the truth about a certain behavior? Take a poll. The results will tell you whether or not the behavior is acceptable.
I am not a statistician, but I did take a course in the subject in graduate business school. I learned enough to know that they cannot be trusted. The deceptive thing about them is that the results include what statisticians call a "margin of error," or sometimes called "confidence level," such as 3%. This gives the method a false aura of being "scientific," trying to legitimize the statisticians as being more than just professional guessers and to justify their high salaries. The implication is that the real guaranteed, proof positive truth lies somewhere within that margin of plus or minus 3%. It ain't so. Even with their aura of science, poll results are nothing more than educated guesses.
The very fallible theory is that if you want to know what 100 million people think, you can ask and tabulate the opinions of a small "sample" of them, a sample that must be purely random, difficult to do. Experts claim that very small random samples can be used with "accuracy." For example, a recent poll sample of the entire U.S. population included only 2,412 people. From that sample, they draw what they call a "statistical inference." They infer the results from the polling results. It is a very sophisticated technique, but unreliable. Statistical polling often flops miserably, with results falling way outside the so-called "margin of error."
Right now the polls show Bush and Kerry statistically very close. But polls can be so wrong that it could turn out to be a landslide for either one of them. Don't be surprised. Only God knows.
Aha! That's the key! Only God knows! But don't tell that to the pollsters. They think they know!
Jim
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