Exit polls aren't what you think they are • Hacker News Board

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#11

Post by snksnk » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

> Unfortunately, everyone (you, your family, that egg on Twitter, most pundits, and at least one organization purporting to be doing exit polling) has no fucking idea how exit polls are conducted and why those initial figures are a steaming pile of crap until real figures on turnout (i.e. the votes themselves) have been tabulated.

We do, don't be so condescending and expletive. The popular press just wants some cheap sound bites to get more views / clicks. They do the same with academic research, in which they mistake economic significance for statistical significance, ignore any shortcomings, ignore non-rejected hypotheses, and project the findings outside of the (often very limited) scope.

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#12

Post by Sacho » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 4:20 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #10

jobigoud wrote: post #3

He didn't choose Springfield at random for his example, this particular bit of counter-intuitive statistic is called the Simpson's Paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I don't think this is really Simpson's paradox (which is named after Edward Simpson, from 1951). In Simpson's paradox, you have a statistic X that is lower than Y in both of cases, but overall, Y is higher than X. It would sound like Simpson's paradox if one candidate won a higher percentage of the vote in both East and West springfield, yet lost the election. But this is of course impossible. Simpson's paradox arise…

The problem described by the article seems like a case of violating dimensional analysis, rather than Simpson's paradox. It might be more obvious if we use clear units: 50 scores voted for A in West, and 80 dozens voted in East.

The article talks about "weighting" the results, which is exactly figuring out the conversion from "democrats in West" to a common unit, "single person", to allow proper arithmetic operations on them.

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#13

Post by DennisP » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

So obviously, early results from exit polls aren't reliable because we don't know turnout numbers.

But after the election, we know exactly who voted, so it seems we could use exit polls at that point to sanity-check the results. Given a paper trail, a significant discrepancy could trigger a recount.

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#14

Post by vxNsr » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

snksnk wrote: post #11

> Unfortunately, everyone (you, your family, that egg on Twitter, most pundits, and at least one organization purporting to be doing exit polling) has no fucking idea how exit polls are conducted and why those initial figures are a steaming pile of crap until real figures on turnout (i.e. the votes themselves) have been tabulated. We do, don't be so condescending and expletive. The popular press just wants some cheap…

This whole article uses condescension as a comedic device, it works for some and not others. But he wasn't actually condescending, he was just trying to entertain.

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#15

Post by isostatic » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 12:23 AM UTC

imarg wrote: post #4

jobigoud wrote: post #3

He didn't choose Springfield at random for his example, this particular bit of counter-intuitive statistic is called the Simpson's Paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Oh man, you said Springfield and Simpsons in the same sentence so I thought the name might be derived from The Simpsons. Well, it isn't.

This is why apostrophies are important - "Simpson's paradox" is the paradox belonging to Simpson. "The Simpsons Paradox" is a paradox named after "The Simpsons"

And don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Re: Exit polls aren't what you think they are

#16

Post by fotbr » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 1:11 AM UTC

One thing I rarely see brought up is that people lie to exit poll takers. Maybe I'm just stupid, or politics are too far above my understanding, but I don't understand why exit polling is taken as gospel (see 2000 shrub vs bore, or brexit if you prefer an international flavor), given there's absolutely zero requirement that responses be truthful.

I know I wasn't good with my statistics classes (I managed low to mid "A"s, but I never really understood the steps I was reproducing, or the why behind the process), but how do you correct for that type of uncertainty?

Is there a good, basic statistics reference that HN would recommend? We used Devore's "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences", and it didn't "click" with me. I'd love to find a good textbook on the subject.