Read the transcript of our chat with John Allen Paulos about sex, statistics and all things numerical. We're about to begin our chat this month with John Allen Paulos. This month's chat focuses on polls and statistics, but feel free to ask other math questions, and we'll try to get to them, too.
Most polls are reasonably accurate snapshots if the sample is large enough and randomly selected.
When I asked how that was known, I was told basically it was a mathematical reality or some such. In otherwords, dogma. No, our approach to statistics is NOT dogmatic, just often flawed. One way I suggest in my column for this month is to have all the respondents secretly flip a coin. This way people won't be embarrassed to answer Yes since it could only mean that their coin landed heads.