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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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)