« Israel And The Iranian Bomb |
Main
| It's Munich! »
11 Aug 2008 02:46 pm
Faux Horserace
Yglesias returns from his break and offers a clear-eyed take on the Gallup tracking poll:
...since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.
Share This
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c45669e200e553ddb1fd8833
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Faux Horserace'
