It came as an Essential Research poll released on Wednesday found 49 per cent of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration, including 60 per cent of Coalition voters, 40 per cent of Labor voters and 34 per cent of Greens voters.
The most common reasons for wanting a ban were fears over terrorism, and a belief that Muslim migrants do not integrate into society nor share Australian values. The poll was first conducted in early August and then repeated to ensure it was not a rogue.
"It's too a big a number to say it's an unrepresentative rump that should be shunned from polite society," Essential pollster Peter Lewis told Fairfax Media.
Medical studies operate on similar sized samples, and these studies help shape medical treatments for the whole worlds population. There are arguments to be made against these statistics, but this is not the argument. This just shows a lack of understanding of basic statistics.
The most common reasons for wanting a ban were fears over terrorism, and a belief that Muslim migrants do not integrate into society nor share Australian values.
Beyond all the media influences I think this is a very valid point...
Professional statisticians generally design the test so that the sample size would produce a sufficiently small margin of error to allow reasonable conclusions to be drawn, this isn't A level biology where ''hehehe, make sure teh sample size is big enuff so dat u can make acceptable conclusions xxx :*'' gets you 3 marks.
People on TSR seem to genuinely believe an acceptable sample size is just a proportion of the absolute population, like you have to ask half or a quarter etc.
Quite right, and exactly the same thing may have happened on this poll too. At the very least they ought to have run the survey more than once.
I'm not sure how that would help if the selection process itself is flawed, with political polls there is always a danger of those people with the strongest opinions being most eager to answer whereas a more ''typical'' member of the population just doesn't care enough to bother.
Professional statisticians generally design the test so that the sample size would produce a sufficiently small margin of error to allow reasonable conclusions to be drawn, this isn't A level biology where ''hehehe, make sure teh sample size is big enuff so dat u can make acceptable conclusions xxx :*'' gets you 3 marks.
People on TSR seem to genuinely believe an acceptable sample size is just a proportion of the absolute population, like you have to ask half or a quarter etc.
The usual reasons for blatantly wrong poll results like that are generally poor sampling methodology, e.g. it only polled readers of one newspaper.
Medical studies operate on similar sized samples, and these studies help shape medical treatments for the whole worlds population. There are arguments to be made against these statistics, but this is not the argument. This just shows a lack of understanding of basic statistics.
To be fair, I made thread yesterday that got completely derailed because people couldn't understand some very basic maths.
To be fair, I made thread yesterday that got completely derailed because people couldn't understand some very basic maths.
TSR has some cool people on it, but compared with the people I've spoken with on other websites, this really is the special ed class. I think it's because it selects for middle class A level kids who just trot out what the learned at school that day.
When I first came on, everyone seemed super clever and logical, then I realised it was because they took A level critical thinking and were just repeating the syllabus, not impressed.
I think the same poll would get even bigger support for banning Muslim immigrants in most European countries. What is really surprising is to see that many left wing sympathisers also support such ban.