[Canelek]

Originally Posted by zodium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Fun fact: Drawing a sound inferential conclusion is an exercise in mind boggling difficulty. Like, you just won't believe how hard it is! Wow! It is, certainly, far too hard to bother going through for a P99 poll. No one qualified to do it would even try.

Now, savagely criticizing a gross misapplication of statistics? That is a different story. Here are a few minor problems with your attempt:

1. As even a first year statistics student would know, that is an on-its-face incorrect interpretation of your computed result. It's such a textbook mistake, the answer given appears as a standard lure in every first-year MCT question bank for statistics exams. Without, at least, a technically correct interpretation, we can never hope for our conclusion to be sound. Grade: C.
2. Your confidence interval, as computed, contains both possible outcomes. This implies the sample size is, in fact, too low to soundly infer a conclusion. Considering your tone, this is at best a very embarrassing error. Grade: F.
3. This is not something anyone who isn't like a statistician or methodologist are supposed to know, I guess, but bears stating to put into perspective how difficult sound inference is: a sound frequentist interpretation can't ever be inferred from this poll, because a stopping rule was not specified in advance. Any conclusion may theoretically be obtained, simply by arbitrarily choosing when to stop collecting data. Applying a Bayesian credible interval technique instead may technically resolve this, but at current sample sizes and proportions is uh, extremely unlikely to produce a result that is both sound and unequivocal in support of either possible outcome. Also, post-hoc/"fishing expedition" analyses ipso facto imply dramatically reduced validity.

Just take the poll on its face, friends. Don't grasp at statistical straws. As the old saying goes,



In conclusion: Slay monsters, not statistics! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well shit. Well done.