How often do you hear statistics bandied about in the media or used to try to prove some special-interest point or this weeks question of what do you think of McCain as a ...
or Obama? "Of course" the people quoting the figures on these polls must be right with numbers on their sides, you think to yourself...
until you look at just how those numbers were arrived at.
The problem is that statistics is as much an art as it is a science.
First of all, you always need to ask where the original "facts" came from.
You can count the pens on your desk and get a hard number say a total of 17, of those 6 are blue, 8 are black and 3 are red.
All of those numbers are direct observations and therefore hard numbers.
Soft numbers would be the total number of people who say they "support" Barak Obama.
What does "support" mean to you as opposed to someone else? I like what he has to say or I gave money to his campaign, it can be very misleading.
Barak Obama is up above John McCain by double digits they cry out but is that %11 or %99? That example was any easy one to recognize as misleading but pollsters and publishers still manipulate the public with even the crudest tactics without being held accountable.
Who did the pollster collect her information from? Did she go to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter and then ask them who they were going to vote for? How many people where polled? From how many different locations were they polled? Even if you can't find a source of bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere.
There always is.
Every poll has a degree of error like plus or minus %3.
5.
The more people that were polled the smaller the amount of error but rarely are more than a few thousand people polled even for a national election.
Never be a sucker again, if there is not at least a degree of error given then don't believe it.
Some pollsters are influenced by the organizations that hire them and hesitant to deliver bad news.
Some pollsters also want to present polling as an exact science, when the questionnaires can often be slanted, and left leaning or right leaning pollsters with agendas can be hired to obtain the expected results like Political Action Committees that hire their friend's company to come up with the result of a "double digit lead" that they need.
At what point is a pollster reporting the findings and at what point is it manipulating public opinion.
Everywhere someone has a politician to sell, an ax to grind, or a point to prove.
The secret language of statistics, so appealing in our fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, and oversimplify.
People should put as much faith in election polls as they do with the weather forecasts.
Be wise, take your umbrella and ask who paid for this poll to be done.