• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    6 months ago

    Me: Explains in detail what’s suspect about this specific poll, while still expressing overall alarm at the state of Biden being in trouble in the election

    You:

    You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it. This is why letting shills or bad faith people participate in the discussion in the first place is a bad idea. I could be using this time to talk with other people who are above-board about what they think, who read and respond to what’s actually said, instead of me investing even a single minute in writing up a message “actually that’s not what I said or even remotely close to it, and you’re just misrepresenting me to make a bizarrely slanted attack on Biden and his supporters, which is your job apparently.”

    Feel free to read what I actually said, and respond to it, otherwise please piss off.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it

      Instead you just did a straw man?

      Lemmy is a small place man, the people who constantly rant against science if it doesn’t back up their opinions stick out. Especially when it’s a topic someone knows about like statistical analysis.

      This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation…

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        6 months ago

        That’s me, I love strawmen and said a whole bunch about what your argument even was, and I hate science. You got me.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        6 months ago

        Actually, if you wanna educate me on science and polling, can you answer this question? That’s one that I am genuinely curious about that I don’t know the answer to; maybe if you’re super up to speed on polling you might know.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          This is the only question there:

          I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?

          But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

          And I’m willing to do that if you can calm down with the insults and multiple replies if I don’t respond immediately.

          It’s the work day homie, you gotta give people more than 5 minutes to respond before spamming them. But this is important, if there’s a chance you’ll start believing in science again, I can spend less than a minute googling something for you.

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            6 months ago

            But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

            Sure thing.

            • New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.
            • New York’s 3rd Congressional District on February 13, 2024.
            • Utah’s 2nd Congressional District on November 21, 2023.
            • Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District on November 7, 2023.
            • Virginia’s 4th Congressional District on February 21, 2023
            • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.

              I was just going to do the first one, but that had 60k voters and Dems won it 2 to 1…

              They barely cracked 10% turnout…

              Not even getting into how the name “Kennedy” fucks up search results with the word “poll” in 2024

              But there just wasn’t time between the state party saying the candidate, and when the state party held the special election for a poll. And I’m not sure how anyone would be surprised.

              So let’s look at the second instead.

              I googled “NY3 polling” and immediately got this

              https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/2024/new-york/3/

              Most polls had Souzzio up 4, Souzzio won by 7.

              But, I’m really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections, elections that occur “off season” with short campaigns and unpredictable turnout because nothing else is on the ballot.

              • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                6 months ago

                But, I’m really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections

                It’s fair. My point in looking at that, is to overall test the assertion that polls are indicative of how people vote. It kind of seems looking at the methodology for the OP article’s poll, like if any accurate information came out of the poll about how the election would go, it would be more or less an accident (or a result of the fact that the poll and the election are both general measurements of how people feel politically overall, and not much more resolution than that.)

                You could flip what you said around, and say that because the special elections are much less complex, and the polls were done much closer to the actual election than polls today about the election in November, I’d expect the polls to be much more predictive of how the election will go, than the OP article.

                So, let’s analyze. As you said, it’s actually not that hard to find polls and results. I’ll follow your lead and look at 538 (for the first three, which is all the effort I feel like investing in it).

                Kinda looks like the polls have some methodology problems. I raised some plausible details for some of what those problems might be, and when we check, hey objectively do it seems like there are problems with the output? We find that, hey look, there are problems. Science!

                (Incidentally, that poll for Utah claimed a margin for error of 4.26 percentage points, with the use of three significant digits of claimed resolution adding an extra layer of hilarity when it turned out their final answer was off by a factor of 267%.)

                  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                    6 months ago

                    Dude you can’t explore with me a question about the accuracy of polling and find out that the answer is that modern polling is objectively shit, which was my point all along even before I started even looking at the question, and then get all condescending about how I don’t know what I’m talking about. 🙂

                    Well, I mean, you can if you want, I guess. I’m happy with my conclusions from the day, though, you being rude about it notwithstanding.