News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I don't think you understood my point when it comes to statistics and significance. I wasn't talking about how many people didn't vote, I was talking about how the people who did vote is a monumental sample size for the entire population. So if the entire population did vote the outcome would be very similar to what the sample size predicted with their actual votes.
Still mathematically incorrect, I'm afraid.
Your point isn't valid because "people who voted" is certainly not a random sample but it is also not an unbiased or stratified sample of the population.
It's very plausible indeed that (for example) democratic leaning voters were jaded and stayed home whilst republicans were excited about the disruptive influence their guy mightt have.
Your sample contains no eligible voters whatsoever in the stayed-home category and it's heinous extrapolation to assume that your proportion extends into this group with markedly different behaviour to those in your sample, especially when the percentages were so close in any case.
Using your logic, I could do a hypothesis test with a tiny sample of hundred voters and get my margin of error under a SL of 5% and claim statistical significance, because if I excluded people who voted in person or people who voted by postal vote, I would get strikingly different outcomes. Thus, if voter preference is correlated so markedly even by method of voting, it's absurd to suggest that there's no correlation over fact of voting.
By your logic (statistical significance irrespective of how non-random and non-stratified a sample is), no pre election poll could ever be wrong.
Statistical significance isn't the same as truth. How representive and free from bias your sample is are two things that are critical to the validity of your conclusions.