iowahawk: Balls and Urns

iowahawk: Balls and Urns

A humorous but educational look at the mathematics of randomly-sampled polls -- confidence intervals and margins of error -- and the non-quantifiable errors that have nothing to do with sampling: "What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you? What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue? What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which color they want to be?... [S]o-called scientific "sampling error" is completely meaningless, because it is utterly overwhelmed by unmeasurable non-sampling error. Under these circumstances "margin of error" is a fantasy, a numeric fiction masquerading as a pseudo-scientific fact."