4 ms·

Relying on any form of polls for a political subject after their performance for November 5th is something else, that's all I can say to your edit.

mustache_kimono 2y ago
I mean the polls weren't really wrong re: 2024? But even if they were, wouldn't such polls, if biased re: Trump and law and order Rs, be worse for Mangione?
- HaZeust 2y ago
  2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember. How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one. ----- Yeah, the biased nature of most people not wanting to publicly sympathize with an early political vigilante WOULD make polls regarding him worse, despite the fact they do. I completely agree with you.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    >2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember. >How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one. It sounds like the polls were off about the popular vote by a few percentage points at most. That meant a lot in the US election context, because the candidates were neck-and-neck. It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll. Why do I see so many basic reasoning errors like this on Hacker News? I thought this was supposed to be an intelligent forum with intelligent posters.
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      >"It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll." My single sentence underneath the horizontal divider in a sub-thread that primarily diverted to discussing the 2024 Election polls, and their accuracy, addresses that. Why didn't you quote that anywhere in your reply?
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
        See if you can critique your own reasoning first, before asking me to do it more.
        HaZeust 2y ago
        Tourangeau, R., & Yan, T. (2007). Sensitive questions in surveys. Psychological Bulletin, 133(5), 859–883. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6117379_Sensitive_Questions_in_Surveys https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6117379_Sensitive_Q... >"Social desirability concerns can be seen as a special case of the threat of disclosure, involving a specific type of interpersonal consequence of revealing information in a survey—social disapproval. The literature on social desirability is voluminous, and it features divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the notion of socially desirable responding (DeMaio, 1984). One fundamental difference among the different approaches lies in whether they treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic or a temporary social strategy (DeMaio, 1984). The view that socially desirable responding is, at least in part, a personality trait underlies psychologists’ early attempts to develop various social desirability scales. Though some of these efforts (e.g., Edwards, 1957; Philips & Clancy, 1970, 1972) recognize the possibility that social desirability is a property of the items rather than (or as well as) of the respondents, many of them treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic (e.g., Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Schuessler, Hittle, & Cardascia, 1978). By contrast, survey researchers have tended to view socially desirable responding as a response strategy reflecting the sensitivity of specific items for specific individuals; thus, Sudman and Bradburn (1974) had interviewers rate the social desirability of potential answers to specific survey questions. > >Paulhus’s (2002) work encompasses both viewpoints, making a distinction between socially desirable responding as a response style (a bias that is “consistent across time and questionnaires”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49) and as a response set (a short-lived bias “attributable to some temporary distraction or motivation”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49). > >A general weakness with scales designed to measure socially desirable responding is that they lack “true” scores, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish among (a) respondents who are actually highly compliant with social norms, (b) those who have a sincere but inflated view of themselves, and (c) those who are deliberately trying to make a favorable impression by falsely reporting positive things about themselves" Looking forward to your response.
  - aoanevdus 2y ago
    Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%, which is a few percent off from the polling average. If the polling on Mangione is similarly off by a few percent (within the margin of error), it hardly affects our interpretation of the results.
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      Give me a break. The polls weren't based on who will get the popular vote. They were based on electoral votes, with swing states polls being that exact toss-up (you can check them again). He ended up winning every single swing state, muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls that was getting time-of-day. Even if you want to die on that purposely misinterpreting hill, it still shows they were inaccurate and unreliable.
      - aoanevdus 2y ago
        Let’s take PA since it’s the tipping point state. Polling average had Harris at a 0.2% lead. Actual result was Trump with 1.7% lead. That’s a 1.9% error. AtlasIntel released a poll which predicted the actual lead: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/20241102_SwingStates_AtlasIntel.pdf https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/20241102_SwingSta... So, “muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls” is wrong. Correlated error between states is expected, and not relevant (ie. if you think Mangione poll is affected by this few % correlated error, again it doesn’t change the interpretation). Overall, election results tend to come pretty close to the polls. They are often wrong by a little bit, occasionally by a lot, which is what you’d expect based on the theory of polling and statistics. The conclusion is asking a large random sample of people what they think, using the best methodologies the polling industry has developed, is a pretty good way of finding out what most people think (within a few % margin of error), certainly more objective than a vibe check of your personal echo chamber. If your argument depends on completely dismissing polling results, you’re probably wrong.
        HaZeust 2y ago
        I thought you were someone else, but now that I know you're not - I want to make something clear: I think that social desirability bias affected the answers of respondents much more [1]. To be clear, that's not the MARGIN of error in those statistics, but rather the difference between predicted and actual. In a five-tier scale, separated between groups, there is already statistical manipulation by having fewer respondents per-category, and therefore a higher margin of error between each. A margin of error even in low single-digit percentages can completely compromise the outcomes of data presented in this fashion. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643027

mustache_kimono 2y ago

I mean the polls weren't really wrong re: 2024? But even if they were, wouldn't such polls, if biased re: Trump and law and order Rs, be worse for Mangione?

HaZeust 2y ago
2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember. How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one. ----- Yeah, the biased nature of most people not wanting to publicly sympathize with an early political vigilante WOULD make polls regarding him worse, despite the fact they do. I completely agree with you.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember. >How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one. It sounds like the polls were off about the popular vote by a few percentage points at most. That meant a lot in the US election context, because the candidates were neck-and-neck. It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll. Why do I see so many basic reasoning errors like this on Hacker News? I thought this was supposed to be an intelligent forum with intelligent posters.
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    >"It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll." My single sentence underneath the horizontal divider in a sub-thread that primarily diverted to discussing the 2024 Election polls, and their accuracy, addresses that. Why didn't you quote that anywhere in your reply?
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
      See if you can critique your own reasoning first, before asking me to do it more.
      - HaZeust 2y ago
        Tourangeau, R., & Yan, T. (2007). Sensitive questions in surveys. Psychological Bulletin, 133(5), 859–883. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6117379_Sensitive_Questions_in_Surveys https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6117379_Sensitive_Q... >"Social desirability concerns can be seen as a special case of the threat of disclosure, involving a specific type of interpersonal consequence of revealing information in a survey—social disapproval. The literature on social desirability is voluminous, and it features divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the notion of socially desirable responding (DeMaio, 1984). One fundamental difference among the different approaches lies in whether they treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic or a temporary social strategy (DeMaio, 1984). The view that socially desirable responding is, at least in part, a personality trait underlies psychologists’ early attempts to develop various social desirability scales. Though some of these efforts (e.g., Edwards, 1957; Philips & Clancy, 1970, 1972) recognize the possibility that social desirability is a property of the items rather than (or as well as) of the respondents, many of them treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic (e.g., Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Schuessler, Hittle, & Cardascia, 1978). By contrast, survey researchers have tended to view socially desirable responding as a response strategy reflecting the sensitivity of specific items for specific individuals; thus, Sudman and Bradburn (1974) had interviewers rate the social desirability of potential answers to specific survey questions. > >Paulhus’s (2002) work encompasses both viewpoints, making a distinction between socially desirable responding as a response style (a bias that is “consistent across time and questionnaires”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49) and as a response set (a short-lived bias “attributable to some temporary distraction or motivation”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49). > >A general weakness with scales designed to measure socially desirable responding is that they lack “true” scores, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish among (a) respondents who are actually highly compliant with social norms, (b) those who have a sincere but inflated view of themselves, and (c) those who are deliberately trying to make a favorable impression by falsely reporting positive things about themselves" Looking forward to your response.
- aoanevdus 2y ago
  Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%, which is a few percent off from the polling average. If the polling on Mangione is similarly off by a few percent (within the margin of error), it hardly affects our interpretation of the results.
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    Give me a break. The polls weren't based on who will get the popular vote. They were based on electoral votes, with swing states polls being that exact toss-up (you can check them again). He ended up winning every single swing state, muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls that was getting time-of-day. Even if you want to die on that purposely misinterpreting hill, it still shows they were inaccurate and unreliable.
    - aoanevdus 2y ago
      Let’s take PA since it’s the tipping point state. Polling average had Harris at a 0.2% lead. Actual result was Trump with 1.7% lead. That’s a 1.9% error. AtlasIntel released a poll which predicted the actual lead: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/20241102_SwingStates_AtlasIntel.pdf https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/20241102_SwingSta... So, “muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls” is wrong. Correlated error between states is expected, and not relevant (ie. if you think Mangione poll is affected by this few % correlated error, again it doesn’t change the interpretation). Overall, election results tend to come pretty close to the polls. They are often wrong by a little bit, occasionally by a lot, which is what you’d expect based on the theory of polling and statistics. The conclusion is asking a large random sample of people what they think, using the best methodologies the polling industry has developed, is a pretty good way of finding out what most people think (within a few % margin of error), certainly more objective than a vibe check of your personal echo chamber. If your argument depends on completely dismissing polling results, you’re probably wrong.
      - HaZeust 2y ago
        I thought you were someone else, but now that I know you're not - I want to make something clear: I think that social desirability bias affected the answers of respondents much more [1]. To be clear, that's not the MARGIN of error in those statistics, but rather the difference between predicted and actual. In a five-tier scale, separated between groups, there is already statistical manipulation by having fewer respondents per-category, and therefore a higher margin of error between each. A margin of error even in low single-digit percentages can completely compromise the outcomes of data presented in this fashion. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643027