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 djones520 wrote:

I love mittens, also i'm passive aggressive.

I see that!

 Grundz wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

I love mittens, also i'm passive aggressive.

I see that!

Troll on bud, troll on.

On the topic of false flags, though, I think it's not unreasonable to think that there have been some in our history. I can't think of any in recent memory but the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Maine, the Reichstag fire obviously all seem pretty dubious.

//unrolling some tin foil

Everyone, please settle down.

"Attack" the argument, not the user.

Also, 'fix'd' and it's variations?

Highly frowned upon here - they are viewed as violations of Rule #1 as they are often used to misrepresent and insult/inflame/etc.

Don't do it.

Thanks!

 Ouze wrote:
On the topic of false flags, though, I think it's not unreasonable to think that there have been some in our history. I can't think of any in recent memory but the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Maine, the Reichstag fire obviously all seem pretty dubious.

//unrolling some tin foil

The USS Liberty would probably be the closest arguable in recent history. I'm not saying I in anyway shape or form buy that the Israelies purposely attacked one of our ships, but I've seen it argued enough that some will claim it just as much as the Gulf of Tonkin.

For those not familiar with the incident, a couple Israeli Air Force jets, and an Israeli Navy boat mistakenly attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy surveillance ship monitoring things during the 6 Day war. It's been argued that Israel purposefully attacked and was trying to mask it as an Egyptian attack, to draw the US into the war.

The sinking of the USS Maine wasn't a false flag. It was a mechanical accident (most likely) that got spun up into an attack by yellow journalism.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
The sinking of the USS Maine wasn't a false flag. It was a mechanical accident (most likely) that got spun up into an attack by yellow journalism.

I don't think an accidental attack is a huge thing really, otherwise British tank corps would be at war with the US air force by now.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Have you taken a middle school science class? Because in there I'm pretty sure we learned that the larger the sample pool, the smaller the margin of error.

Yeah, and I've actually looked at the figures. And I've even gone so far as to realise what a margin of error of 3% means. It means we're almost certain the number is within 3% of the stated 29%. And that means that maybe it could be as low as 26% in the whole population, and maybe it could be as high as 32%.

And now think about that. Does it change our decision making one tiny fething bit if the number is 26%, 29%, or 32%? It doesn't, in terms of decision making its an immaterial difference. Asking more people and narrowing that band achieves nothing... especially when, as I already pointed out, the real problems with studies do not change when you ask more people (the real problems being systemic issues, and in this case knowing if someone is answering honestly or taking the piss about a stupid question)

The problem I have with your statement is the underlined portion. In a country like Germany or England, where the population is a lot more homogeneous, I can see your point making a bit of sense. Maybe in a single city, or at most a state, yeah, ok. But in the USA, that will never work. Look at just how different California is to Texas, New York is to Alaska, Colorado is to Hawaii, etc.

"The place I live in is really complex and detailed, but the places the rest of you live are all homogenous."

Please. We're all diverse, with multicultural populations and strong regional characteristics. That you know nothing about how Perth operates culturally or politically compared to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or any other city doesn't make those differences go away.

For example, if you were to use Kentucky as an example, people in Lexington and Louisville are far more likely to be a Democrat and have more "liberal" values. Drive 20 minutes outside the city limits in any direction, and you can't walk ten feet without seeing a Republican bumper sticker.

And out here in the rest of the world we have nothing like your 'inner city liberals', or anything of the suburban conservatives, and their differences to rural conservatives. Nope, none of that over here.

Do you not see how that could lead to some extremely off kilter statistics?

Nope, not in the slightest. Asking 64 people will give you a reasonably small band. Combine that with similar polling numbers of other population groups and you get a band that is plus or minus 3%. Which is an immaterial difference.

But lets think about your proposal, of asking thousands of people. That means the more expensive methods of contact like using the most up to date registries, calling mobiles as well as landlines, and combining that with door to door polling just can't be used. It means you have to settle on cheaper methods to save money, maybe restricting yourself to crappy old registries, using landline only calls. And if you're talking about 20,000 people it means you're probably going to have to use passive on-line polling.... which has so many issues its results are always going to be less reliable than a poll of even just a 100 people.

So all you've really done is introduce a load of systemic problems in to your survey, and all because plus or minus 3% somehow means you have to ignore the result entirely.

I'm just saying trying to have 834 people count as an average for a country with over 300 Million people is a little crazy.

Statistics says you're wrong.

Seriously, there are loads of problems with surveys. You're right not to believe anything that's posted in a survey. In this case, as I said in my first post, the biggest problem with an outrageous question like this is knowing if any given poster is telling the truth or not. And then there's all kinds of methodological problems that can exist depending on how the information was phrased.

But, simply put, the problem is almost never with the sample size. 834 people reduces the margin of error down to a pretty solid number.