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This one makes me wonder: "The first thing they noticed was that when R2K did polls that tested how men and women viewed certain politicians or political partie
by praptak 16y ago
This one makes me wonder: "The first thing they noticed was that when R2K did polls that tested how men and women viewed certain politicians or political parties (favorable/unfavorable) there was an odd pattern: if the percentage of men that rated a particular politician favorable or unfavorable was an even number, so was the the percentage of female raters."
How could they produce such results? Even if the results are 100% fake, they certainly did not do it on purpose.
Take men's results and add a random multiply of 2 to produce women's results? Naah.
- regularfry 16y agoEither there's a cognitive bias to pick both-even or both-odd numbers when making things up, or they generated random numbers in [0..50] and multiplied by 2.
- praptak 16y agoThe first one seems improbable and the second one would never produce odd numbers which I believe was not the case - it produced both odd and even ones, just never both and even in a single sample.
- regularfry 16y agoTrue.
- smartscience 16y agoI'm guessing they picked an integer A for the average of the men's and women's percentages, and then a smaller (positive or negative) integer D for the deviation from this average for each sex. Then they could use A+D as the score for the women and A-D as the score for the men. If one of these is even (or odd) then so must the other be. It might be worth checking to see the distribution of D, compared to real variation between men and women.
- eru 16y agoPerhaps A was even derived from some real results? And they just made up A for the cross tabs?