Race and mental traits: Nicholas Wade's third error

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Tuesday July 08, 2014 · 8:50 PM PDT

2014/07/08 · 20:50

(Cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium)

An octogenarian once invited me to his old, exclusive East Coast club to give a talk about neuroscience, my area of specialty. Afterwards, as we walked past oil portraits of old white men across the centuries, the octogenarian pulled me aside, lowered his voice and asked, “I was wondering if you could explain something. What is it about the brains of Chinese and Jews? They seem superior.” Evidently, as a member of one of those tribes (the former), he thought I might know the answer.

mindgeek

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Thursday November 01, 2012 · 5:46 AM PDT

2012/11/01 · 05:46

In this year's race, national polls show a tie, while state polls show a decisive Obama advantage. The discrepancy has interested many commentators on the right: Karl Rove, Ross Douthat. Also Andrew Sullivan. Today at the Princeton Election Consortium, I offer a resolution to the apparent problem. I suggest that the difference may arise from the fact that the same systematic pollster errors can have different effects depending on whether they occur in national vs. state surveys.

Based on past elections, national poll aggregates differ from election results by as much as 2.5%. During the same period, state-poll aggregation has been considerably more accurate. Even if state polls have the same accuracy as national polls, races at that level are usually decided by larger margins, leaving room for aggregation to remove the effect of the error. I suggest that the Meta-Analysis of state polls provides a more accurate poll-based prediction of next Tuesday's outcome than national polls.

mindgeek

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Wednesday October 31, 2012 · 5:21 PM PDT

2012/10/31 · 17:21

Greetings, all. My name is Sam Wang. I founded the Princeton Election Consortium. The site's Meta-Analysis of State Polls started here in 2004 as a diary during the Bush v. Kerry race. Now, in collaboration with Andrew Ferguson, it's grown from a single page of HTML to a full-fledged site...

...until today, when our server went down. Because we're in Sandy-struck New Jersey, we'll be operating on a temporary basis for a little while - no more than a day or two, I hope.

I wonder if I could please commandeer DailyKos for commenting purposes. I'd be grateful. It's a bit retro - and sentimental for me.

Come see what's happening over at the Princeton Election Consortium.

-Sam Wang, Princeton University

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What's wrong with the national polls?

mindgeek

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Wednesday August 08, 2012 · 12:13 PM PDT

2012/08/08 · 12:13

(Cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium)

National polling averages are contradictory: Pollster gives Romney by +0.4%, TalkingPointsMemo gives Romney by +0.6%, and RealClearPolitics gives Obama by +3.4%. Who's right, and why are these measures fluctuating from day to day?

mindgeek

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Tuesday August 07, 2012 · 11:51 AM PDT

2012/08/07 · 11:51

(Cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium)

Many readers of this site know that pollsters vary in their methods. However, existing solutions, such as correcting for bias, have attracted controversy. As a result, one prolific pollster can dominate the discussion.

Here I present a solution based on a very simple -- and neutral -- statistical principle. If adopted by Pollster.com, TalkingPointsMemo, and FiveThirtyEight, it would make poll aggregation far more useful.

mindgeek

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Wednesday November 11, 2009 · 10:41 AM PST

2009/11/11 · 10:41

(Cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium)

Back on the false-belief beat...sort of.

I've previously written about false belief formation from the standpoint of neuroscience. One current prominent category is the delusion, mostly on the right, that President Obama is thought to be hiding something really big. These days it's his citizenship: "Birthers" claim that he is not a Hawaii-born US citizen eligible for the presidency (never mind the 1961 newspaper announcements and this thorough debunking).

And now the queen of the Birthers, Orly Taitz, has finally managed to get a court date.

mindgeek

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Saturday June 20, 2009 · 6:43 AM PDT

2009/06/20 · 06:43

By now hundreds of statistically minded people are poring over Iranian election data. Here's part 1 of my analysis, which is also cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium.

Three general categories of data are currently available for validating the Iranian election: (1) pre-election polls, (2) statistical methods for analyzing standalone voting data, and (3) statistical comparisons with past elections. In this diary I examine pre-election polls, which when aggregated under normal conditions are very good measures of sentiment.

A simple look at pre-election polls leads to the following assessment: National Iranian polls were highly variable and of suspect quality. But within Tehran, polls were more uniform and allow a comparison. Six Tehran polls gave a median lead for Moussavi by 4%. This differs notably from the official tally for the city, Ahmadinejad by 12%. The 16-point discrepancy suggests an anomaly in Tehran and opens the question of whether fraud occurred here - and elsewhere. However, it is also important to note several caveats, including polling uncertainty and possible shifts in opinion following the Ahmadinejad-Moussavi debate on June 3rd.

Details after the jump.

mindgeek

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Thursday June 18, 2009 · 9:01 PM PDT

2009/06/18 · 21:01

By now hundreds of statistically minded people are poring over Iranian election data. Here's part 1 of my analysis, which is also cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium.

Details after the jump.

mindgeek

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Sunday September 28, 2008 · 10:07 AM PDT

2008/09/28 · 10:07

Over at the Princeton Election Consortium I have been concerned with factors that may systematically bias polls. Accuracy is an essential component of using national polls to gauge where national opinion is - or, in the case of my Meta-Analysis of State Polls, the Electoral College.

A hot topic among polling nerds is the "Bradley effect," which occurs when a non-white (usually black) candidate falls short of opinion polls on Election Day when he/she runs against a white candidate. For this reason it has been suggested that support for Obama might be overstated - a hidden penalty. Now comes a large-scale empirical study (in preprint form) by Harvard political scientist Dan Hopkins. He finds that since the mid-1990s, the Bradley effect has disappeared. A preprint of his paper is a must-read.

mindgeek

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Tuesday August 26, 2008 · 8:23 AM PDT

2008/08/26 · 08:23

In my day job I'm a neuroscientist. Usually this does not intersect with politics, but today's an exception.

In June, my book co-author Sandra Aamodt and I wrote for the New York Times about how our brains lie to us, allowing the formation of false beliefs. Examples of false beliefs include rumors about Barack Obama's religion, or about John McCain fathering a mixed-race child. We didn't realize at the time just how relevant our topic would be in this year's campaign.

Dan Froomkin asked us if brain science could be translated into practical lessons for journalists on how to prevent false belief formation. The answer is yes. So we wrote a piece for him that outlines four principles to guide journalists.

(cross-posted at the Princeton Election Consortium)

mindgeek

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Tuesday August 19, 2008 · 7:32 AM PDT

2008/08/19 · 07:32

A recent story tells about McCain's focused ad spending in battleground states, and Obama's broader spending pattern. McCain is focusing on battleground states, while Obama is spreading resources more broadly.

Why the mismatch in strategies? Here I will give a quantitative argument that in terms of optimal resource allocation, both patterns of behavior make perfect sense, given the campaigns probably think their best strategies are for winning.

[Cross-posted at election.princeton.edu]

mindgeek

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Monday August 04, 2008 · 8:34 AM PDT

2008/08/04 · 08:34

This post continues my discussion of how to meta-analyze state polls. My most recent post was on Saturday morning. Today I’d like to focus on a particular strength of meta-analysis, its use as a precise tracking tool.

Meta-analysis of state-level polls allows one to make an estimate of where the race stands at any given moment. As a biophysicist and neuroscientist, I use simple yet powerful statistical tools that reduce the complexity of state polls to a single snapshot, the Median Electoral Vote Estimator. Its effective margin of error (MoE) is currently 35 electoral votes, equivalent to less than 1.0% in units of popular votes.

This exceptionally small MoE outperforms any other publically available measure, including fivethirtyeight.com. Poblano’s resource is valuable and fully deserving of its popularity. However, his work does contain a flaw that introduces unnecessary error - one that I fixed four years ago in 2004. My repair is available at election.princeton.edu for your use between now and November.

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Race and mental traits: Nicholas Wade's third error

Princeton Election Consortium - Resolving national vs. state polls

Princeton Election Consortium - a technical announcement

What's wrong with the national polls?

A nonpartisan solution to the Rasmussen issue

Birther Orly Taitz gets her court date...sort of

The statistics of Iran 2009: Part 1, pre-election polls

The statistics of Iran 2009: Part 1, pre-election polls

The disappearing Bradley effect

Stopping false beliefs - lessons for journalists from brain science

A probabilistic view of the 50-state strategy

A flaw in fivethirtyeight (and a meta-analytic repair)