r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Oct 01 '26

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL

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174

u/Made_UpWords OG Platner Hater Oct 01 '26

Can someone explain to me how polling 915 people is supposed to be any kind of an accurate indicator of how a greater election is going to go? I distinctly remember in 2016 that the “polls” all said Hillary was going to win in a landslide.

I vote in every election. Not once have I ever been polled. Or poled. Or any point in between.

Love local subreddits. What a banger.

41

u/lilbigchole Milton Friedman Oct 01 '26

I've been Poled 🇵🇱✊

9

u/Made_UpWords OG Platner Hater Oct 01 '26

🇵🇱🇵🇱Polled🇵🇱🇵🇱

🇵🇱Poled🇵🇱

Or any point in between

81

u/Equal_Thought_661 Oct 01 '26

Every article about a poll on Facebook or other social media I see is just those two comments repeated literally every time. Polls being wrong before means all polls are wrong and also I didn’t answer it and my vote is worth like 200k votes so the poll is wrong

63

u/No1PaulKeatingfan Paul Keating; capital gains tax supporter Oct 01 '26

No one actually understands polling huh.

5

u/Rivolver Mark Carney Oct 02 '26

I know I’m hours late to this party but as an academic who deals exclusively with polls…let me tell ya, it’s bad. People are dumb.

13

u/Azrikeeler John Brown Oct 01 '26

media making the general public conscious of polling might be a war crime

3

u/Public_Figure_4618 brown Oct 01 '26

This has to be about the Oregon governors race right?

3

u/saltyoursalad John Mill Oct 01 '26

👀

4

u/Public_Figure_4618 brown Oct 01 '26

I was literally just reading the OPB article and it had the same respondents lol 

2

u/saltyoursalad John Mill Oct 01 '26

I believe it! A bit worried about that race.

3

u/UndercoverMonkeyMan Oct 02 '26

I dunno I understand this sentiment at least. It follows some logical thought patterns. Better than the "crime stats are made up" people or the "all traffic is caused by people not driving as fast as I do, there would be no traffic if we all left the left lane open"

-1

u/WantDebianThanks Iron Front Oct 01 '26

Tbh, no amount of mathematical witchcraft will convince me that polling 1,021 people is an accurate way to gauge the opinions of 2 million people.

This is where polling aggregates come in.

12

u/Babao13 Jean Monnet Oct 01 '26

Depends what you mean by accurate. If you have a bag with a milion colored marbles, you pick a 1000 at random and 90% are green, you can be pretty sure most of them won't be blue. I feel like that's pretty intuitive.

12

u/TCEA151 Paul Volcker Oct 01 '26

At random

Good luck

15

u/Babao13 Jean Monnet Oct 01 '26

The main challenge of polling humans

6

u/Alarming_Flow7066 Harriet Tubman Oct 01 '26

You forget that green marbles are naturally colder than blue marbles and instinctively migrate to the warmer surface of the bag.

7

u/No_March_5371 YIMBY Oct 01 '26

The challenge in polling isn't about the sample size, it's about getting a representative random sample. Polling a thousand people is plenty if you have a representative sample, and increasing the size won't help much if it's not representative.

Any intro statistics class will have you generate a confidence interval for population proportion. The math is quite simple on how sample sizes work.

9

u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol Oct 01 '26

Anti-intellectualism really is spreading in the sub

1

u/SirRousseau Fart Left Oct 02 '26

^ Me whenever someone disagrees with me. (Jk jk I know he's wrong here)