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How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages
- matthewbauer 10y agoThis is really fascinating. I get why the poll creators made these decisions, but the results of the weighting lead to a ridiculous result compared to other polls. Supposedly this poll was extremely accurate in 2012, so who knows?
- tedmiston 10y agoI'm not sure I get why they bracketed the age group so small as 18–21 vs the broader census definition.
- throwaway729 10y agoThis is the first presidential election for those voters.
- contravariant 10y agoI don't get why the bracketed the age group at all. Surely you can just estimate the distribution?
- tankenmate 10y agoYou don't really need to estimate the distribution of ages; the electoral roll and the census will give you a distribution with an error that is several orders of magnitude small than the sampling error from the poll. For all intents and purposes the electoral roll and census data is so close to reality that you might as well declare it as such for calculations.
- contravariant 10y agoWell if the idea is to correct for the biased sampling of your poll you actually do need to estimate the distribution of ages in the people you've polled. Dividing them in small groups and calculating the proportion of people in each isn't the best approach though.
- tankenmate 10y agoYou don't need to estimate the distribution of the ages of the people you have polled unless of course you don't know the ages of the people you have polled. You have two distributions of ages here; both are known (within reasonable comparatively minute errors), no need to estimate. The distribution of ages of the electorate, strictly not known, but so so close to known compared to all the other estimates you have to deal with. And the distribution of the ages of your pollees, you simply ask them their age (estimating whether they are lying to you about their age is an infinitely deep philosophical hole you'll never get out of).
- SpikeDad 10y agoThen the poll creators made bad decisions. Even with transparency there's no reason why a poll can't be constructed specifically to heavily favor a particular candidate which it seems is just the case. It's very humorous when Trump cites this poll considering what an outlier of civilized humanity he is. Matches nicely.
- jacquesm 10y agoInteresting use of the word 'civilized' that I wasn't previously aware of.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoI thought this was a place where people discussed technology and society, not cheap petty name calling of a national candidate we don't like. @dang can you please block this user?
- MrZongle2 10y agoRegarding the Times' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".
- untog 10y agoDoes it matter? The point is that they published an article that is factually accurate. If they were publishing an opinion piece based on such motivations there might be an argument here. But they aren't.
- MrZongle2 10y agoAre you asking if at this point, what difference does it make?
- whamlastxmas 10y agoYou're completely missing the point. Publications show bias all the time based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today, even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage. This is what your parent comment was referring to.
- mwfunk 10y agoEither that, or you are the one with bias, and the news outlets you go to and/or the people you associate with feed into that bias. You can see just as much bias in the opposite direction on any number of news sites. They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly. Individuals are usually even more imperfect than most news outlets when it comes to having limited sources of information and unexamined preconceived notions about things. No one is off the hook for being personally responsible for trying to understand all sides of a debate or being as educated as possible on all sides of an issue. I only say this because I see huge correlations between people complaining about bias in news outlets (regardless of political leanings) and people who don't see just as much bias in their own preferred media inputs.
- throwawayqwe 10y agoI'm posting under a throwaway account just to say I agree with you; if that says anything.
- davesque 10y agoI'm posting under my own account to say I disagree. We're talking about data here. Whether or not the Times has any motivation behind publishing this article, the data and methods still speak for themselves.
- 83457 10y agowhy?
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142 and marked it off-topic.
- blank_dan 10y agoLet's go find the really heavily weighted members of _all_ the polls and dox them too. This way we can screw them all up. Not just one that is influenced by a potential Trump voter.
- roywiggins 10y agoThis isn't doxxing.
- blank_dan 10y ago'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll though.
- crooked-v 10y agoA drastically skewed poll isn't very "authentic" in the first place.
- sp332 10y agoThe whole reason for being transparent about the polling methodologies is so we can analyze and critique them.
- maxerickson 10y agoThe article does not question the authenticity of the poll. It complements the pollsters on their documentation and sharing of data: It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey. It does point out an aspect of the poll that may undermine its utility in accurately predicting the result of the election, but it's a pretty dry fact, the repeated inclusion of a heavily weighted voter. If Trump takes 10-20% of the black vote, then the poll did a good job predicting the results. I don't expect that to happen.
- hx87 10y agoWhat exactly is wrong with questioning the "authenticity" of a poll based on its methodology?
- aetherson 10y agoNate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as: 1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls. 2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to another. Or at least, so he claims. Obviously, he runs a poll aggregator, using a model that heavily weights the trendline of individual polls, so he has a dog in this fight.
- erickhill 10y agoHis dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.
- marricks 10y agoHave you seen the comparisons to Princeton's Election Conesertium which did something similar but without the "special sauce"? He did a little worse, which is a bit of evidence saying Sam's more straight numbers are better than Nate's judgment.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoor random error.
- marricks 10y agoDefinitely possible, that's why I said "a bit"
- throwaway729 10y agoI think it will be really interesting to see what happens in election forecasting if Trump wins this election -- doubly so if there's no major scandal for Clinton between now and election day.
- LyalinDotCom 10y agoPOLLING IS BULLSHIT. that is all.
- venomsnake 10y agoLet me see you implement observer, async io or something similar without it ...
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all.
- sytelus 10y agoTLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.
- chmullig 10y agoIt's not that the cell is small. It's that it has a single respondent representing it, so his weight is increased enough to be the equivalent of 30 respondents.
- tankenmate 10y agoOne thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they are ordinal variables. Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). [0] http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf and http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf
- artursapek 10y agoThis makes me feel so much less confused about that poll
- bbctol 10y agoI'm not sure if he doesn't know his role, and I'm curious how tracking polls like this try to account for the large media attention paid to the poll and its methodology. This guy is known to stats nerds, and they've been tracking his moves and (rather mean-spiritedly) calling him "Carlton" for a while now.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoTIL: If a poll doesn't agree with your opinion, the poll must be flawed. With that logic, I'm sure YC will have dozens of more unicorns!
- eatbitseveryday 10y agoWill the era of click-bait titles come to an end?
- succstressful 10y agoAs soon as it stops working, it will stop being employed.
- flomo 10y agoSadly, when I first clicked on this, it had a much better headline. Something like "LA Times poll, how sample sizes make it an outlier". Maybe clickbait++, or maybe the NY Times felt better about fingering a young black guy than a competing paper.
- matt4077 10y agoCan you come up with a better one? Because it's as fair a summary as I could write within that space, and the article was pretty much what I expected before I clicked. I see no harm in headlines that create interest as long as they are not misleading.
- eatbitseveryday 10y agoThe article has almost nothing to write about the "19-year-old Illinois man" but everything to do about the "U.S.C./LAT poll" and its characteristics. The poll chooses weights and as such this random person's decisions are given higher precedence. The title should reflect the _poll_, not the man. HE himself is doing nothing. The title is misleading as I assumed the article would discuss grassroots activities by this man and how he's making great strides to influence polls. I would learn who he is, what he is doing, and how his actions have been effective. But, this is not the case. He has no idea and in fact this man is entirely irrelevant as an individual.
- jakub_g 10y agoSide rant: what the heck did they implement on NYtimes.com ?! When I quickly click the text (which I compulsively do to select a paragraph etc.), it changes the font size (sigh)
- mmanfrin 10y agoI am a compulsive selector and I absolutely hate websites that try to add functionality to selections. No, I do not want to share this selection, website, especially when your JS code hangs for a moment as it loads a stupid twitter image.
- rsoto 10y agoUgh, what were they thinking? I can't even imagine what this feature would be for!
- MichaelGG 10y agoI think it's some sort of idiotic tap-to-zoom, like for mobile/touch browsers? Since browser zooming is hit and miss, they probably thought they were oh-so-clever. As Raymond Chen says, someone probably got a raise for this.
- pwg 10y agoRunning NoScript (https://noscript.net/ https://noscript.net/) in default deny all javascript I can click to select paragraphs without the text doing anything beyond becoming 'selected' text. (Note, I do not normally do this, I had to test to verify.)