Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Also ( MMP notwithstanding) it is very hard for one grouping to make it 3 elections in a row and so to some extent that pushes the momentum over to a Labour led grouping.
Quite the opposite. It's very hard for them NOT to make 3 elections. That's the median and the mode across NZ history since the 1930s. Mode="most common value". In other words, Labour will actually be bucking the trend if they manage to win this time. In the MMP period, 3 terms is the only number of terms (we can't count this one, it might not be finished) that parties have managed.
A phone poll via land line is almost laughable
I can't get why they are still so ubiquitous. It's not like the cost of the damned phone call to cell phones is a really significant part of a survey cost.
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes, it's extremely hard to make sense of the error margins they give. Each number should get its own 95% (or whatever they pick, which should also be reported) confidence interval. It's pretty shit when even people who do understand statistics can't reliably understand what the numbers they give represent.
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Peter Green,
Oh, and keep up the good work. I find those graphs extremely useful compared to anything in the MSM news. A real trove of info, and always leading to interesting debate.
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Peter Green,
It’s entirely possible that they’re measuring accurately, and that people are consistently having a last-minute change of heart on election day.
Yes. Or even that there’s some kind of systematic lying about intentions to vote National. Or that the undecided at polling time subsequently decide before the election itself, and that they’re more likely to not be National voters.
But these are actually questions that possibly could be statistically answered. I’m curious whether polling companies would attempt that, considering that they do get competitive advantage out of having better results. By better I mean “results that more accurately predict what customers really want to know – what the actual election results will be”.
They could, for example, do follow up polls to the original sample, asking whether they changed their minds in the last days before the election, or how they voted if they were originally undecided, and maybe even some kind of analysis of the reasons for that.
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, I'm pretty sure Danyl made the same reasoning explicit in a post once. But the rub is in what Gavin say here:
I'm not privy to what exactly the other companies ensure that their samples are representative and I'm not going to share our exact methods with you - we all jealously safeguard those because they can be points of competitive advantage.
It's quite possible that they have made adjustments to the way they take their samples on account of the obviousness of this apparently systematic bias. I mean, isn't that what statisticians do? Try to remove or account for bias in their methodology?
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Further to the bias adjustment, btw, I do not know to what extent this reasoning is actually correct. It's possible that the pollsters are actually taking this into account already, in which case Danyl is reliably underestimating the National support. Does anyone actually know if they do? It's not like these polls aren't actually conducted by experienced statisticians.
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I rely on Danyl's poll of polls before I even bother with polling news. It's worth noting that he "adjusts for bias", which means that he turns down the average for each party by how much the average got it wrong at the last election. This was substantial for National. Or something like that - I don't know the exact maths of it.
His analysis is usually interesting, too. I think he has a tendency to overgeneralize from quite small fluctuations, and has serially called for every Labour leader's head as a result of this, but I still consider it essential reading.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Emma Hart,
How private you want to be is a factor of how hard you have to work to keep yourself safe.
I think that you're half right there. You're suggesting that your choice of a solution will come down to how hard you have to work to get the level of safety you want? Which for people who feel very unsafe, is quite a lot if the system is very unprivate by default. But for people who feel far too safe, a highly locked down system is going to also be a lot of work.
It's a conundrum for designers. Always was, and I think they tried the more safe way first (security constantly comes up in design discussion). It just didn't take off in the same way. The argument they'd make is that whilst the overall average need for security might be way lower, when that need is high, it's a real need and the consequences of it not being secure can be very high for the user.
But the counterargument is "we're in business of selling software, not keeping people safe. We want it to be popular. But yes, thanks for the input, security guy. We'll make sure the legal team write it very clearly into the terms and conditions that consequences of security breaches are not on us".
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Was the butter chicken nice? There's definitely good and bad butter chicken, and maybe people went there especially for it? Not uncommon in restaurant trade to have one outstanding dish that gets ordered 10 times more than everything else, at certain times of the day.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Emma Hart,
We’ve had some issues with bullying which was over social media, but they don’t associate that with the technology. Why would they? It’s just like talking.
It's easy to imagine how they might engage with it, and just as easy to get that wrong. Asking seems like the best way to find out.
My feeling is that their expectation of privacy is much lower, and that’s just the way it is.
How about their desire for privacy? Because that's been the suggestion for a long time with Facebook, that it's success was because of the invasion of privacy, rather than in spite of it. There was no shortage of more locked down options when the battle for the social media space first took off. But they were deeply unappealing to kids on university campuses, because the whole idea of locking oneself down tight, controlling everyone's access to you, just seemed like something one's parents would think was a good idea, whatever social opportunities it cost you. In fact, it still is my actually parents idea about how such things should be done.
I know this is an even harder question to judge, because we were never in the position as teenagers of having the option to open ourselves to the world the way Facebook allows. So our own desire for privacy at some past point is hard to judge. My gut feeling is that if it had been around when I was a teenager, I'd have been in like Flynn, and any time someone looked up something about me that they "shouldn't", I'd probably have been stoked.
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