Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

After reading Jon's explanation of how much care is put into creating 
exit polls, I am nevertheless struck at how creating good exit polls is 
an art rather than a science.  It requires intelligently guessing what 
the sources of bias might be, and working as hard as possible to remove 
them.  But there may be other sources of bias that they didn't think of, 
and which only appear in elections somewhat rarely.

And a problem with calculating a p statistic that is way small is that 
this is the chances of such a thing happening in any one election, when 
you really need to be computing the chances that it would happen in any 
of the huge number of elections that have had exit polls computed for them.

Also, from an anecdotal point of view, I wouldn't expect the exit polls 
to be consistently wrong across the board unless there were a large 
scale effort to subvert the results of the election, and to do such a 
thing in total secret without someone somewhere spilling the beans is 
just not feasible as far as I can see.

But more than that, I have spent some time thinking in general about 
statistics.  Some of the large data problems that people are dealing 
with (e.g. microarrays that Jon told me about recently) is revealing to 
me just how ad-hoc statistical methods are.  As best as I can see the 
only statistical method with any pretension to any kind of solid 
foundations is the Baysian method, but my impression is that for large 
data problems it tends to give way worse results than the other more 
ad-hoc methods.

I personally question the very assumption that the laws of probability 
can be applied to real life questions like "how likely is it that 
Macbeth was written by Shakespeare?"  Probability theory has had a very 
fine development, and works extremely well for computing chances that 
certains hands will appear in poker.  And indeed if you try playing 
games of chance without knowing the laws of probability, a clever person 
can rip you off big time.  But I think it has been simply assumed that 
these same laws can be applied to problems like how effective 
medications are, and I am now wondering if this assumption is truly 
warrented.

Stephen

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