I was led by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, to an article by Chesterton on the kinds of statistics used in polls. Here is an excerpt (the second paragraph […]
Chesterton On Polls
On The Cubs’ & Trump’s Victories, Nate Silver’s Predictions & All That
https://twitter.com/ThaRightStuff/status/794045050753794048 Some crow is presumably being eaten by Nate Silver and the folks at FiveThirtyEight.com this fine morning. I recommend they bake it into a pie (which I learnt from an episode […]
A Coincidence: Coyne Zinged Me Before I Him — Or, The Coyne Fallacy Redux
After posting yesterday’s article, Jerry Coyne Doesn’t Have Free Will (poor fellow), I immediately saw hits coming to my place from Coyne’s. It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, the afternoon before, […]
Cheating With Polls Down Under. Guest Post by Stephen Dawson
Today’s post is from our friend Stephen Dawson, who writes at hifi-writer.com. I scheduled this in advance, knowing I’d be suffering jet lag. Professor Will Steffen from the Australian National University is […]
Gallup On Satisfaction With Gay “Rights”, The Remnant, & The Episcopalian Grounding
Galloping to our doom Surveys of public attitudes in democracies are interesting. When pollsters aren’t lying (more on this another day), polls are crude snapshots of the adult “general public’s” attitude to […]
Iowa Caucus Open Discussion. Update: Text Fixed, Those Coin Tosses Discussed
https://twitter.com/mattstat/status/694224471712878592 That tweet was my prediction early yesterday, which I made partly relying on polls but more on the size of the crowds those two men garnered. About those polls, these: As […]
Stephen Hawking Thinks Too Much Of Us; More
Autumn of the Modern Ages What!? You haven’t headed over to Mike Flynn’s place and read his series The Autumn of the Modern Ages? Sometimes I don’t understand you people at all. […]
What Regression Really Is: Part II
Read Part I Let’s continue our example. Suppose our regression shows that the probability of a Hate score greater than 5 is 60% for men and 80% for women—for people we have […]
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