tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13576198.post6763105671755541383..comments2023-09-05T05:20:50.393-04:00Comments on second americano: A Virtual Tie?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13576198.post-73667714190065962412008-02-19T16:46:00.000-05:002008-02-19T16:46:00.000-05:00The only thing I'd add is that the +/- is within a...The only thing I'd add is that the +/- is within a confidence interval (which is usually something like 95% for polling), so to use your metaphor and my preferred interpretation of statistics, you are following a football game, you just heard on the radio that there are 20 football games going on of which your game is one, and in every one the score is 7 to 10. In addition, in 19 of them, one team just scored--ergo, the game you are interested in is virtually tied.<BR/><BR/>What are the odds that the game you are interested in is actually tied? Using your four possible outcomes and assuming they're all equally likely given that one team scored, it's more or less (.25 * .95) = 24% chance (similar calculations tell you that there's a 52% chance they're behind and a 24% chance they're ahead). <BR/><BR/>So we find that "virtual tie" is actually code for something like, "this poll tells us that Hilary's more likely to be ahead of Obama, but we're only 50% sure of that. It could be the other way around, or they could be tied, which is, electorally speaking, not a valid result, so we pretty much have to throw that out, too." Unfortunately, that's just a convoluted way of saying, "Dude. This race is, like, really close." Which we already, like, totally knew.Transient Gadflyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com