Now, that might sound impossible, but suppose that the people that were asked were attending a National Rifle Association convention.
It’s pretty easy to imagine asking 1000 voters and getting an outcome, for example, that the people you polled came out for the Republicans by an 80-20 split. Suppose, like is often in the case of US presidential election, the actual vote will be very close-very nearly 50-50. Learn more about induction within polling and scientific reasoning. That’s an attempt to estimate the range of possible outcomes. That’s why good newspapers give a margin of error. If only a couple of thousand people are asked, that’s not good enough to get an accurate estimate of how the vote will turn out. On the other hand, there are hundreds of millions of possible voters. So pollsters call a few people to see how they’re going to vote. Prior to an election, not every person in the country can be asked who they’ll vote for. One place where statistics is used a lot is in elections. The bottom line is that if you want to determine a probability, you need to gather a lot of statistics. Election Predictions and Polling Statistics
#HEAD OR TAILS COIN FLIP SERIES#
This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the Misconceptions of Science. That is still not a good enough measurement to determine if the coin wasn’t unfair by 51 to 49 percent. Even if the coin is flipped 1000 times, you can still expect to get a number in the 47 to 53% range. If a coin is flipped 10 times, the outcome can be anything from 0 to 10 heads. So what’s the message here? The message is that using statistics doesn’t easily answer a question. What if the same experiment is done by flipping the coin 1000 times? If you flip a coin 1000 times, it’s most likely that you’ll get heads somewhere between 47 and 53 percent of the times. So, if you do flip a coin 10 times and see 3 heads, that’s a pretty common outcome and you can’t conclude that the coin is unfair. It shows that when you flip a fair coin 10 times, you can pretty much get any outcome with reasonable probability.
(Image: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock) The probability of getting heads clusters closer around the 50% mark as the number of tosses increases. For 6 through 10 heads, it’s just the opposite. How often can you expect to get heads if you flip a fair coin 10 times? You expect to get 0 heads about 0.1% of the time, 1 head about 1% of the time, 2 heads about 4% of the time, 3 heads about 12% of the time, 4 heads about 21% of the time, and finally, 5 heads only 25% of the time. So, is the coin fair? Well, the conclusion is “maybe”. Say you flipped the coin 10 times and came up with 3 heads. The first question we want to ask is: Is the coin fair? Will you get heads 50% of the time? Let’s start with a situation that’s pretty easy. (Image: Gearstd/Shutterstock) Judging the Fairness of a Coin But why does this happen? Figuring out percentages and probabilities is a complex task, and one which can lead to misconceptions.
By Don Lincoln, Ph.D., University of Notre Dame Percentages are often misleading, even in the simplest of situations, like flipping a coin, and definitely in more complex situations, like poll figures before an election.
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