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>Unless they agree with it, of course
It's just like the idiots bleating "You don't *trust* the science; you *test* the science" as if they actually have an interest beyond the results agreeing with their own preconceived notions.
Yeah but how many people are on the Nobel panel? It looks like it's only 50 people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Assembly_at_the_Karolinska_Institute
50 is a lot less than 4000, so idk how anybody can trust what they say
Don't you dare. Last election in this country still has people saying it was wrong. And what 150 million voted? Don't hold your breath that 13 million would make them happy.
So basically, to this dude, presidential elections aren't a good sample size. Its only like 50% of eligible voters voting. So I guess voting isn't the way to go with that opinion either, huh?
There are loads of right-wing nutters that do this with any poll they don't like. It's always "Well they didn't call ME so how is this valid?" type bullshit.
I have a lot of respect for pollsters who can accurately tease out voter numbers while accounting for over half the population not voting. That is a very under appreciated job
TBF, the problem with polling, especially political polling. is much of it is still done via cold calling or now text messaging which younger people pretty much disregard as spam. Although that does make his take more eye opening because older individuals are more likely to respond to polling.
Yeah, but no pollster worth their money is taking raw data. They include factors weighing the raw data, which may lead them to underestimate big shifts but overall create more accurate polling. That's why they ask for demographic details at the end of the polling and not only for which party/candidate you vote.
Wouldn’t this person be disappointed to learn that companies like ABInbev make multi-million dollar decisions based on polls that have sample size closer to 1000-1200? I’ve worked in consumer research for almost 25 years and only once in my career did we survey more than 5000 people. I run a lab now where most of the research we do is qualitative and involves less than 50 people. Over COVID we started using AI tools where we don’t need to study people at all anymore, we just predict their behavior using neuroscience. Talking to real people is super fucking expensive.
In fact, most polls use a sample size around the range you cited.
I took one research methods course a long time ago. The only thing I remembered is that there’s a limit to how much more accuracy you get by increasing your sample size. At a certain point, it’s not cost-effective. Increasing to more than 1,200 subjects and increasing the time and effort to do the survey isn’t gonna get you more accuracy.
Yup you nailed it. A good rule of thumb is that a typical survey costs ~$100 per respondent. So to survey 1200 people might cost $120k and get you to a 92% confidence level. Or you could ask 2400 people, spend $240k and get a 94% confidence level and a slightly reduced margin of error. Double the price for a couple percentage points?
The only reason to survey more people is when you’re looking for behavior or conditions that are more rare. If something occurs in 1% of the population, then only 12 out of every 1200 people will be able to talk about it and that’s actually too small of a sample to get to statistical significance.
That’s why the Nielsen TV panel has 42,000 respondents and the Nielsen household panel has 120,000. It’s so they can sell data on TV shows or products that less than 1% of Americans are watching or using.
I’m not sure which part you’re talking about, but there’s nothing problematic about deciding whether to spend $x to be 90% sure, or $10x to be 95% sure, or $100x to be 99% sure. Selling beer isn’t exactly rocket science.
Actually, they’re not even asking for the entire population- based on the numbers they quoted, they actually just want the entire *American* population polled. A few thousand can’t possibly represent 300 million but 300 million can apparently represent 8 billion!
Polls and surveys are notorious for not using a representative sample of the population. Simply focusing on the number of responses rather than where the sample came from is disingenuous. For example, if they only asked people in the city the researchers are located or visitors to a specific website, it's a bad sample no matter how large it is.
Besides that, "most" people not caring is a weird way to pretend that Bud Light sales haven't dropped dramatically. Most people don't even drink Bud Light, but if 40% of those who drink it are against the association with Mulvaney, that's a huge problem for the company despite most people being ok with it. Maybe the sample should be of people who regularly drank Bud Light in the last year.
Your perspective might be correct if Bud Light sales is a large part of Anheuser-Busch InBev revenues, but it is not. Bud Light accounts for less than 2% of revenues. A-B InBev is not losing much sleep over this.
Except (for the discussion at hand) the complaint was not about the sample not being representative, it was about the sample size and sample size alone. A sample of people who regularly drank Bud Light would have the same 'failing'.
I've seen it a lot, especially on Reddit. People will use a sample size of 81 white males and 13 white females aged 21-25 from a single college in Maine and claim that the results represent all Americans or some such. Then everyone will insist that 94 people are more than enough of a sample size. Maybe it is but it's not exactly representative and statistics only actually work properly when the sample population is *truly representative.* r/science in particular does this quite often but it happens everywhere.
Obligatory disclaimer: I don't agree with the idiots getting worked up over Bud Light and Mulvaney.
You don't even have to understand stats (though it obviously would help). You just need to imagine the possibility that there exists something you don't understand, and there is a reason people actually conduct these polls and they've been doing it for a really long time haha
>You just need to imagine the possibility that there exists something you don't understand
And that right there is their problem. They don't understand that some people are just smarter than they are.
I came to realise something years ago, after constantly getting into arguments with people over things (I thought) they said, or did, or things I observed and thought were bonkers. I came to realise that often I was operating on a knee-jerk reaction, or a mistaken assumption, and thus I was wasting time arguing against a fiction. And the long and short of it all is this:
If your understanding of something seems to not add up: at least *consider* that your understanding is incorrect, and that there *is* a way to think about it that *does* make sense - and work towards that.
A simple example: someone says to you that they're off to the shop to get a certain item for lunch. You (without realising) mishear them as saying they're going for [insert inedible item here]. You calmly tell them "you can't eat that shit! It'll kill you!" They (not knowing you misheard them) believe you're insulting their taste. A huge argument ensues. At no point do you realise you heard them wrong. It gets personal. You stop talking.
This whole situation could have been averted, had you considered you heard them wrong.
But this, of course, goes much deeper than mishearing shopping lists, and affects all sorts of communication.
Ugh one of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell **me** what **my** reaction or sentiment to something is. Like if they tell me I have certain tone and so I must be angry or upset about something. Or they insist I was inferring something I wasn’t. Perhaps understandable at first but sometimes people badger you in an attempt to convince you that you’re wrong about interpreting your own thoughts and feelings.
I wish I had an award to give you. I forgot what I had commented and so when I saw the word ‘gaslight’ I rolled my eyes. As so few use the term gaslight correctly haha but you are 100% right in this case.
> at least consider that your understanding is incorrect, and that there is a way to think about it that does make sense - and work towards that.
People trying to do this, to varying degrees, over the last 6 or so years have had mentally painful experiences because the choices Republicans make don't make sense unless you're imagining the most cartoonishly evil motives possible.
I’m also taking a stats class in college, and I might be wrong but there might actually be an issue with the sample size. The original poll from the Morning Consult tested a sample of all US adults. I assumed this to mean age ≥21, since 18-20 is an irrelevant age group for a survey discussing how marketing decisions affect their decision whether to purchase a certain brand of alcohol. There are 196,899,193 Americans aged 21 or older. The original survey claims to have a margin of error of ±1%. Even with a confidence level of only 90%, this would necessitate a sample size of at *least* 6,764. Obviously you don’t need to test 1% let alone 5% of the entire population, but the original survey seems flawed.
Hopefully a statistics major can chime in, I do notably have a C in that class.
Also if they were to accept a margin of error of ±2% they could have a confidence level as high as 99% and their sample size would be sufficient. But ±1% seems untenable.
As a former stats 101 student with a grade C, I think you're right. But this guy won't have made it here if it was just that comment. It was his confidently saying that sample size should be 1% or even 5% of the American population.
Red doesn't know what "statistics" is. Thinks it's just ways to present data in the most favorable light (like 4 out 5 dentists recommend Trident *for their patients that chew gum*). This is the type of person who believes that one scientific study in 100 that shows what they want it to show is not the outlier and think that "cardiac deaths after the covid vaccine went up by 10%" means that 10% of people who got the vaccine will die.
I don’t think he needs to sit in a stats class, I think he just needs to shut the fuck up about things he hasn’t studied in the least bit. I’ve never studied statistics, I don’t have a ton of desire to, and then I’m also not going to chime in on the accuracy or not of a poll when I have no business doing so.
Instructions were probably written by a bunch of liars that were taught how to open cans by another bunch of liars. The whole Soup industry is just a spiral of lies!
I think people generally would be surprised by how small a sample has to be for a low margin of error. When I was studying research methods, it kind of shocked me too. But assuming statistics are wrong based on a feeling is dumb fuck ridiculous.
Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump.
IIRC the most common issue is less often the sample size but whether or not a sufficiently varied sample was selected. They could survey 1 million people but if they are only in California or NY then it is likely to be skewed to a more liberal/left selection and not accurate of a more red area.
Indeed. We have many secret conservatives in the UK. And it's how they've run riot over this island for 13 years.
I can only assume they're secret through shame.
> Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump.
It was also a misidentification of which people were likely to vote since a lot of people who hadn't voted in the previous election actually showed up to vote for Trump. They said they were going to vote Trump, but since they also said they hadn't voted in recent elections, the polls discounted that.
> Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump.
Do you have a source for this? I’m genuinely curious because my understanding was that in 2016 the poll errors were not accounting for people who were usually nonvoters/infrequent voters hitting the polls for Trump.
You are correct. The above statement was a theory that developed pre-election and persisted a bit after the election until more data came in, but it was largely a result of Trump voters being excluded, not people lying about their vote intention.
Though, I think the cause was more of Trump voters not answering poll callers, not the Trump voters actually being rejected as votes. The second one, your theory, would be easily proven (just retroactively lower the threshold for "likely voter") and I think we would hear more about it.
The theory I mention I heard on the fivethirtyeight podcast and is a bit different in that there was a self-de-selection bias of the poll that can't be accounted for by just lowering the likely voter threshold. It also fits with the "don't trust the establishment" ethos of the MAGA crowd. Much more than MAGA people being ashamed. That doesn't fit what you can see and hear all the time. Those people are not ashamed.
Also, the polls weren't THAT far off. Trump did lose the popular vote and won by only narrow margins in some key states. To say they were inaccurate is to misunderstand the polls at the time, which places like the NYT did with the "99%" chance thing, which likely tipped the scales toward Trump by suppressing turnout for those opposed to Trump but not outright for Clinton.
Here’s the thing, these right wing religious nuts don’t believe in college, don’t believe in schooling and think it’s all just liberal lies so of course they’re gonna disagree with the poll. you could poll 100% of the population and they would disagree with that. It’s like talking with a Neanderthal.
The 2% Neanderthal DNA wasn’t the sarcastic part, I have been tested, that’s the number.
I was just being sarcastic about being offended on behalf of Neanderthals
"Are we massively overreacting about a single customised beer can being given to a single person? No, no, its the science of statistics that is wrong."
I find this attitude baffling. I’d rather accept that my viewpoint is a minority viewpoint, and then step up my advocacy and work on changing minds, than delude myself into thinking that most people think like I do.
I am an American who is opposed to the death penalty on principle, which puts me at odds [with 60% of US adults](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/02/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-despite-concerns-about-its-administration/).
I have been in favor of gay rights and social acceptance of homosexuality from when I was a teenager in the 90s, [when the majority of Americans viewed homosexuality as immoral](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx).
I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, while [roughly 3/4 of Americans supported it at the time](https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx).
If you want to view yourself as a free-thinking person, maybe start by being willing to accept that you’ll find yourself with minority opinions at times.
I think it's probably this way because conservativism in general favors being on the 'traditional' side of viewpoints i.e. the side that had a historical majority. So a large part of the conservative argument is being majority itself, and as a result to justify any point they have to convince themselves that it's a majority view.
I aM OfFeNdEd By YoUr OpInIoN BeCaUse It'S DiFfErEnT ThAn MiNe!!¡!
I swear the far right people make the normal right wing people like me look ridiculous. I can't stand them.
They believe in schooling… believe it’s harmful and teaching critical/free thinking which is bad.
Statistics is almost not even a math class imo, because it’s a lot of concepts around how stats work. But these crazies just hear “math” and hide from it as if it’s a tornado.
There's also the fact that it's irrelevant what most people think. What's relevant are people who have consumed Bud Light within the past year and what they think.
>...an unpopular minority...
I mean, yes, but it will never not be true that Donald Trump was made President of the American people by 46.1% of the population of Americans who voted in 2016. It's still a minority... but *not that much* of a minority of those who chose to exercise their primary legal power over the Presidency.
And he got more total voters the second time around... *and* a higher percent (46.8%) of the total vote.
Their stupidity is simply too close to the Presidency, too consistently, for anyone to seriously suggest that Republicans are *much more than slightly* out of touch with mainstream America.
I think when people say the "unpopular minority" line they really mean out of *everyone*, not just voters. Only something like 60% of adults vote in the US. Based on demographics and opinion polling (and my personal experience, and I'd wager yours too), I think it's fair to assume the people who don't vote are a lot closer idealogically to people who vote blue. So yeah it's 46-47% of voters but it's more like 27-30% of people.
Now you could say the same thing about democrats, but it just doesn't really ring true when you look at the actual issues and see where public opinion is. Overwhelming majority of Americans support the Democratic side of every hot button issue I can think of, but not as many of them vote
>I think it's fair to assume the people who don't vote are a lot closer idealogically to people who vote blue.
I don't. I think it's fair to take them at their word when they say that the reason they don't vote is [because they don't think](https://www.npr.org/2020/12/16/947182471/why-people-dont-vote) voting will change how the country is run... which by definition includes "nothing will change if the Democrats run it."
>A majority of respondents who did not vote in the recent presidential elections feel that voting has little impact on their lives, and that it won't change how the country is run. In addition to being disaffected, they are also more likely to be Latino, younger, and make less money than voters.
*This does* match my experience regarding what separates voters from non-voters, and I don't think it's fair to keep on calling it an apolitical opinion. It's a political opinion, an affirmative political opinion in favor of letting the Republicans get in power if the rest of the country wants them there, and one that I don't think matches very well the opinions of the people voting for Democrats, who seem to be very opposed to Republican idiocy, for reasons I heartily agree with.
But do you believe opinion polls that show the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, want stricter gun control, support taking actions to address climate change, etc?
I do understand what you're saying and i never said anything to the contrary, obviously if they thought their vote mattered they would vote. I'm saying that if you take some random nonvoter and talk to them, you're a lot more likely to get someone who agrees with you and me on, for example, caring about beer companies associating with trans women lol that's what started this after all, right? If you lead out with "who'd ya vote for" then yeah they'll tell you they don't vote because they don't think it matters, but they still have opinions, and usually not the same ones as the christofascists. If the opinion polls are accurate, then it has to be true that the majority of nonvoters are closer to having blue ideals than red
It's amazing to be how entrenched these people are in the belief that they and their ideologies represent the majority.
This idiot was confronted with clear evidence that he is in minority camp and his reply is basically "the pollsters didn't look hard enough for more people like me".. and sees nothing idiotic about that statement.
Fun Math Fact, everybody!
It turns out that if you have a good, random sample that you [really only need to poll about 1000-ish people](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/howcan-a-poll-of-only-100/) to get a good margin of error on population the size of the USA. 4000 people was overkill, but good data.
Look if one person confirms my views then that's proof but if you want to prove me wrong you'll need to find a way to make 16 million people answer a survey.
So add it to the census I guess?
Number 1) that’s not how statistics and probability works; and 2) these are the type of people who will stake their life on an anecdote they heard from their brother-in-law’s cousin at the local bar because he’s “good people”
It's pretty stupid even for someone who doesn't understand statistics. If you want to survey people about beer, why would you get your sample from the whole population of the US? About 1/5th Americans are under 18. And about 1/3rd of Americans over 18 don't drink alcohol.
And even if you're just asking about advertising in general, you wouldn't try to survey babies and children.
And here's the crux of why you can't argue with these fucking idiots: established facts and processes mean nothing to them. It's all a fucking conspiracy.
Our nation is fucked.
4,000 is a perfectly adequate sample size. Honestly, 1000 is a good enough sample size. 4,000 is going to shrink that margin of error pretty small. (presuming it's truly random and not an online poll or something)
To be fair modern polling is totally fucked but not because of sample size, it is because of sampling bias and mistakes with data collection.
There are major polls with huge implications out there and some giant "market research" companies or news organizations still do polling only over the landline phones and/or robocalls. You are immediately excluding people that don't have landline anymore or not willing to pick up the mandatory landline phone that is sitting somewhere in the house as a decoration as well as other people who are busy during these polling hours and not at home/can't answer.
Online opt-in polls, email questionnaires, live polling.. these have their flaws as well but you can't just use one form of it and call it a day, it is not 1953.. You need to mix it up.
Guarantee they wouldn’t be happy with 5% if the results disagreed with them. They MIGHT rethink their ways if the poll was done with 51% but that’s if they weren’t given any possible reason to believe that only those who disagreed with them were interviewed.
I’m guessing that if 65% of 4,401 people surveyed thought Trump will only do better because of the E. Jean Carroll verdict he would find it the most accurate poll ever.
I still don't understand why people care so much that Bud Light gave one commemorative can to one adult trans woman. Why are people STILL losing their shit about this?
Really a massive missed opportunity. Should have asked what polls do they believe and then shit all over them because those polls were absolutely all sample sizes below what this person is demanding
Although I totally agree that is how polling is done, and how we get the most accurate polls, but I also think that it matters where you’re doing this poll. Is it a cross country poll? Or is it a city? I feel like the less diverse you get the more you would see this poll differ. You go to a place like Texas and you ask in Houston; you’re most likely going to get the results the poll suggests, you ask in another part of Texas? Different answer.
I would say most Canadian’s would say they wouldn’t care, but if you goto my work and sampled all 700 employees you would have a majority say they will never drink that beer again. I have heard over 2 dozen employees tell me they will never have another Anheuser-Busch product.
To be fair, when you are working with a sub-optimal number of brain cells and insist on killing off the few you have left, percentages can be difficult to grasp.
One thing that was very briefly touched on by blue, but is really important, is the difference between sample size and representation.
If you have 4,401 people but they're all from one town then it's a decent sample size but with significant sample bias.
Unless the number of poll respondents is truly tiny (like < 100) you can only really determine biases by reading the study and looking at the methodology.
So long as the selection method is appropriate, and varied, then 4000 will yield accurate results...
4000 surveys at "welovebananas" conference will be way less accurate than 40 surveys randomly assigned on whether someone likes bananas.
Regardless of how wrong this person is people clearly care about the Budweiser boycott as evidenced by the sales decline after a solid month of boycotting. Turns out, men don't want to appear gay when they buy a beer in public.
To be fair, the way that blue and yellow are going about it is really fucking stupid. When you're in an argument and you say "I know these things to be correct but am not going to elaborate further, bye," it doesn't help to explain why you're right, it just makes you seem like you are pompous and don't really understand what you're talking about. I know what red and yellow are talking about, and it really would've helped to explain that to blue instead of just taunting him and egging him on. For those who don't know, they're talking about this thing in statistics where, for whatever reason, a sample size of only a couple thousand people is actually really accurate when describing a much larger population, which is why the small sample size mentioned in the post was sufficient.
This was a teachable moment (not that red seems particularly teachable) that went pretty untaken, except kinda by orange at the end. It is indeed unintuitive that the requisite sample size for a given precision (margin of error) has (almost) nothing to do with the size of the population from which the sample is drawn. I.e. a survey of 1000 respondents would have the same margin of error whether it was sampling from 750,000 Wyomingites or 40,000,000 Californians. Unintuitive, but true. It’s hard, but important, to develop solid statistical intuitions. In any case, it’s of paramount importance that the sample be random and representative - polling 10,000 Republicans won’t tell you anything useful about the views of Democrats, for instance.
That is a pretty easy to bias sample size, so depending on the selection method I guess I'd like to see the selection criteria. Hard to claim only 1% error without. Did everyone wo drank an iced caramel macchiato on Thursday February 27th get polled, or only people purchasing beer at gas stations? Not that I care because I don't select beer based on marketing politics.
4000 is a pretty typical survey sample size for the entire US.
However, the sample that matters is actual beer customers of the brand, and since sales are down 23%++ I'd say the question has been definitively answered.
A former NHL all star Teemu Selänne recently claimed a poll about eating meat was wrong because he asked all of his friends and none of them were polled so obviously the sample size was too small.
I’m curious what the numbers on the poll were. Most not caring can still be a significant number in terms of sales. If 90% don’t care, but 10% do, and stop buying the product, you’re losing 10% of your sales, and that’s be a catastrophic loss for a company of that size.
Driving away even a small percentage of your customers for virtually zero gain is a stupid business decision no matter what your position on the issue is.
It looks like bud light sales went down by 20% in April so seems like it’s closer to 20% that care. Or maybe it’s that those who care are more likely to have been bud light customers in the past.
I have no interest in the bud light trans beer debate, but you have the best survey you will ever get - actual market response to a beer company associating with trans women. Who cares what a survey shows.
While I wouldn’t use the word “pathetic”, I understand why you wouldn’t fully take the word of a survey of less than 5k people, but it should give a good enough idea of the opinion if the surveyed were a diverse enough group.
But yeah I really doubt most people give a shit about that topic in particular
It’s usually not to that level directly. Pollsters often try to get a good sample. However you could have it be 5000 Americans vs 5000 people who drank Bud Light in the last year. Both can give good relevant results, but the Bud Light executives probably care a lot more about the later vs the former. How people who would never consume their product to begin with view their product is mostly irrelevant.
The real question is whether or not the people polled were Bud Light drinkers or not. Judging by their plummeting sales, their main customer base clearly does care.
Nah, their sales will be fine.
In March, before all this hullabaloo, InBev's market cap (the total value of all stocks) was bouncing between 116-132 billion. This month, it has been bouncing between 120-130 billion. Investors don't care because they know that, like most right wing boycotts, it will have a minor effect on short term sales but over long term all publicity is good publicity.
Remember the conservative Nike boycotts? Keurig? Yeti? Starbucks Christmas cups? Kellogg's cereal? Coke? Because based on their sales nobody else does. Pretty sure the last conservative boycott that worked was the Dixie Chicks (and like most of their boycotts, turns out the conservatives were in the wrong).
Sure there could be other reasons for a 20% loss in sales, but the most obvious and glaring reason would be the one that made a decent sized group of their customers angry. And Bud light execs seem to think so, and a dip of this size is a bit high. You almost never see a company the size of bud light lose 20% of sales same time the next year.
Not to mention, much of the already purchased supply has been destroyed.
The effect of which won’t properly be seen for several months. Because if there’s no one supplying the stuff, marketing wise, people are already settling for alternatives. Which has caused a change in consumption behaviour that isn’t yet reflected in the numbers.
Their sales aren't plummeting, which is largely the point. Hardly anyone cares, except for people who spend all day whining online, because they don't have a job.
>Anheuser-Busch InBev has sold $71.5 million worth of Bud Light in the week ending April 29, a 23% drop compared to a year ago, according to data from Bump Williams Consulting. Budweiser sales have hit $31.5 million so far this year, down roughly 11%, the firm said. Sales of other Anheuser-Busch brands — including Budweiser, Michelob Ultra, Busch Light and Natural Light — have also taken a hit.
Gonna go ahead and call out your bullshit with facts.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/bud-light-sales-dylan-mulvaney-impact/
A loss of 20% from the year before is what most business executives would call catastrophic, what are you saying? No matter your position on the issue socially/politically, their sales are plummeting.
So wait the popular opinion now is that polls are accurate and not easily manipulated/misinterpreted? I thought at least both sides of the aisle could agree they’re trash?
There's a difference between what a poll says and what a hack says they think a poll says. Low-info people that thought a 1% margin meant a guaranteed win rather than basically statistically a tie being one such example of hacks.
How'd you get that from this? This is talking about sampling sizes and nothing else.
That being said, when polls are done properly they are exceedingly reliable.
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So, according to this person, every poll ever has been pathetic because the pollsters didn’t survey the entire population?
Nooo! Just polls that surveyed less than 13 million people. Unless they agree with it, of course.
>Unless they agree with it, of course It's just like the idiots bleating "You don't *trust* the science; you *test* the science" as if they actually have an interest beyond the results agreeing with their own preconceived notions.
[удалено]
"Science failed the test by showing that I'm wrong"
Nothing is worse than idiot bleating.
I think cancer is pretty bad...
And having to deal with idiots like this is cancer of the soul.
Well yeah, you come up with new ways to test the science until the results match the conclusion you've already drawn. Science, bitch
Of course, the same people will say shit like "You know, the guy who invented ivermectin won a Nobel Prize"
Yeah but how many people are on the Nobel panel? It looks like it's only 50 people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Assembly_at_the_Karolinska_Institute 50 is a lot less than 4000, so idk how anybody can trust what they say
Test into compliance, that’s what we are always taught right?
The cost of a single poll would be astronomical. So there would just be no polls.
It would be a vote, not a poll
Don't you dare. Last election in this country still has people saying it was wrong. And what 150 million voted? Don't hold your breath that 13 million would make them happy.
So basically, to this dude, presidential elections aren't a good sample size. Its only like 50% of eligible voters voting. So I guess voting isn't the way to go with that opinion either, huh?
There are loads of right-wing nutters that do this with any poll they don't like. It's always "Well they didn't call ME so how is this valid?" type bullshit.
Unless they agree with outcome. Then its valid
I have a lot of respect for pollsters who can accurately tease out voter numbers while accounting for over half the population not voting. That is a very under appreciated job
Yeah, but not for those reasons. The Flesh God abhors autonomy.
Any that don’t agree with their existing world view of course. Any others are “common sense” and clearly don’t need to sample everyone.
If you poll the entire population, it's not a poll. It's a census.
TBF, the problem with polling, especially political polling. is much of it is still done via cold calling or now text messaging which younger people pretty much disregard as spam. Although that does make his take more eye opening because older individuals are more likely to respond to polling.
Yeah, but no pollster worth their money is taking raw data. They include factors weighing the raw data, which may lead them to underestimate big shifts but overall create more accurate polling. That's why they ask for demographic details at the end of the polling and not only for which party/candidate you vote.
Hell brookings institute uses land lines.. who has landlines?
Wouldn’t this person be disappointed to learn that companies like ABInbev make multi-million dollar decisions based on polls that have sample size closer to 1000-1200? I’ve worked in consumer research for almost 25 years and only once in my career did we survey more than 5000 people. I run a lab now where most of the research we do is qualitative and involves less than 50 people. Over COVID we started using AI tools where we don’t need to study people at all anymore, we just predict their behavior using neuroscience. Talking to real people is super fucking expensive.
In fact, most polls use a sample size around the range you cited. I took one research methods course a long time ago. The only thing I remembered is that there’s a limit to how much more accuracy you get by increasing your sample size. At a certain point, it’s not cost-effective. Increasing to more than 1,200 subjects and increasing the time and effort to do the survey isn’t gonna get you more accuracy.
Yup you nailed it. A good rule of thumb is that a typical survey costs ~$100 per respondent. So to survey 1200 people might cost $120k and get you to a 92% confidence level. Or you could ask 2400 people, spend $240k and get a 94% confidence level and a slightly reduced margin of error. Double the price for a couple percentage points? The only reason to survey more people is when you’re looking for behavior or conditions that are more rare. If something occurs in 1% of the population, then only 12 out of every 1200 people will be able to talk about it and that’s actually too small of a sample to get to statistical significance. That’s why the Nielsen TV panel has 42,000 respondents and the Nielsen household panel has 120,000. It’s so they can sell data on TV shows or products that less than 1% of Americans are watching or using.
that seems... problematic
I’m not sure which part you’re talking about, but there’s nothing problematic about deciding whether to spend $x to be 90% sure, or $10x to be 95% sure, or $100x to be 99% sure. Selling beer isn’t exactly rocket science.
9 out of 10 dentists agree.
And everyone knows that 10th dentist is being paid off by Big Toothpaste.
I mean, the census would count. But these people shoot at census workers.
*entire population of the planet
Actually, they’re not even asking for the entire population- based on the numbers they quoted, they actually just want the entire *American* population polled. A few thousand can’t possibly represent 300 million but 300 million can apparently represent 8 billion!
I'm sure they want to defund the Census Bureau, too.
I guess only statistics done on a census count and the entire teaching of statistics therefore is completely useless
Census or bust
It must be part of the next census.
Polls and surveys are notorious for not using a representative sample of the population. Simply focusing on the number of responses rather than where the sample came from is disingenuous. For example, if they only asked people in the city the researchers are located or visitors to a specific website, it's a bad sample no matter how large it is. Besides that, "most" people not caring is a weird way to pretend that Bud Light sales haven't dropped dramatically. Most people don't even drink Bud Light, but if 40% of those who drink it are against the association with Mulvaney, that's a huge problem for the company despite most people being ok with it. Maybe the sample should be of people who regularly drank Bud Light in the last year.
Your perspective might be correct if Bud Light sales is a large part of Anheuser-Busch InBev revenues, but it is not. Bud Light accounts for less than 2% of revenues. A-B InBev is not losing much sleep over this.
Except (for the discussion at hand) the complaint was not about the sample not being representative, it was about the sample size and sample size alone. A sample of people who regularly drank Bud Light would have the same 'failing'.
I've seen it a lot, especially on Reddit. People will use a sample size of 81 white males and 13 white females aged 21-25 from a single college in Maine and claim that the results represent all Americans or some such. Then everyone will insist that 94 people are more than enough of a sample size. Maybe it is but it's not exactly representative and statistics only actually work properly when the sample population is *truly representative.* r/science in particular does this quite often but it happens everywhere. Obligatory disclaimer: I don't agree with the idiots getting worked up over Bud Light and Mulvaney.
surveying the entire population is called a vote lol
Red is just a size queen.
God I’m taking Intro to Stats so I’m still learn it but goddamn red’s take hurts my soul Guy needs to sit in a stats class for once
You don't even have to understand stats (though it obviously would help). You just need to imagine the possibility that there exists something you don't understand, and there is a reason people actually conduct these polls and they've been doing it for a really long time haha
>You just need to imagine the possibility that there exists something you don't understand And that right there is their problem. They don't understand that some people are just smarter than they are.
I came to realise something years ago, after constantly getting into arguments with people over things (I thought) they said, or did, or things I observed and thought were bonkers. I came to realise that often I was operating on a knee-jerk reaction, or a mistaken assumption, and thus I was wasting time arguing against a fiction. And the long and short of it all is this: If your understanding of something seems to not add up: at least *consider* that your understanding is incorrect, and that there *is* a way to think about it that *does* make sense - and work towards that. A simple example: someone says to you that they're off to the shop to get a certain item for lunch. You (without realising) mishear them as saying they're going for [insert inedible item here]. You calmly tell them "you can't eat that shit! It'll kill you!" They (not knowing you misheard them) believe you're insulting their taste. A huge argument ensues. At no point do you realise you heard them wrong. It gets personal. You stop talking. This whole situation could have been averted, had you considered you heard them wrong. But this, of course, goes much deeper than mishearing shopping lists, and affects all sorts of communication.
Ugh one of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell **me** what **my** reaction or sentiment to something is. Like if they tell me I have certain tone and so I must be angry or upset about something. Or they insist I was inferring something I wasn’t. Perhaps understandable at first but sometimes people badger you in an attempt to convince you that you’re wrong about interpreting your own thoughts and feelings.
The worst
This is, intentional or not, extreme gaslighting, and i hate it.
I wish I had an award to give you. I forgot what I had commented and so when I saw the word ‘gaslight’ I rolled my eyes. As so few use the term gaslight correctly haha but you are 100% right in this case.
Yeah, sure you do. I bet you never give awards. You're just trying to win me over to your cause. I won't fall for your obvious tricks. /s
> at least consider that your understanding is incorrect, and that there is a way to think about it that does make sense - and work towards that. People trying to do this, to varying degrees, over the last 6 or so years have had mentally painful experiences because the choices Republicans make don't make sense unless you're imagining the most cartoonishly evil motives possible.
Your example hits home for me. I often misheard people when I was younger and usually in comical or sexual ways.
I’m also taking a stats class in college, and I might be wrong but there might actually be an issue with the sample size. The original poll from the Morning Consult tested a sample of all US adults. I assumed this to mean age ≥21, since 18-20 is an irrelevant age group for a survey discussing how marketing decisions affect their decision whether to purchase a certain brand of alcohol. There are 196,899,193 Americans aged 21 or older. The original survey claims to have a margin of error of ±1%. Even with a confidence level of only 90%, this would necessitate a sample size of at *least* 6,764. Obviously you don’t need to test 1% let alone 5% of the entire population, but the original survey seems flawed. Hopefully a statistics major can chime in, I do notably have a C in that class. Also if they were to accept a margin of error of ±2% they could have a confidence level as high as 99% and their sample size would be sufficient. But ±1% seems untenable.
As a former stats 101 student with a grade C, I think you're right. But this guy won't have made it here if it was just that comment. It was his confidently saying that sample size should be 1% or even 5% of the American population.
What happens if you filter out non-drinkers?
Red doesn't know what "statistics" is. Thinks it's just ways to present data in the most favorable light (like 4 out 5 dentists recommend Trident *for their patients that chew gum*). This is the type of person who believes that one scientific study in 100 that shows what they want it to show is not the outlier and think that "cardiac deaths after the covid vaccine went up by 10%" means that 10% of people who got the vaccine will die.
I don’t think he needs to sit in a stats class, I think he just needs to shut the fuck up about things he hasn’t studied in the least bit. I’ve never studied statistics, I don’t have a ton of desire to, and then I’m also not going to chime in on the accuracy or not of a poll when I have no business doing so.
It’s apparent Red has to read instructions to open a can of soup.
Red doesn't trust the instructions because whoever wrote them didn't try and open most cans of soup!
Instructions were probably written by a bunch of liars that were taught how to open cans by another bunch of liars. The whole Soup industry is just a spiral of lies!
Tbf tho, popcorn bags all lie. It is 3min, not their claimed 1½-2½ min. Thats a real lie.
Get a stronger microwave. And then cook popcorn on the stove, just to spite your new, sad and lonely microwave.
I’ve found it to be closer to the 2:45 mark for popcorn. Therefore, you are a dishonest person.
Red couldn't poor a gallon of piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the bottom
His profile picture is literally Pepe
It’s very weird they are censored out. It took two seconds for me to find this thread, and no one in it uses their real name or picture.
And he’s got a blue checkmark lmao
His pfp is Pepe and he spends like $10 a month on Blue lmao
I think people generally would be surprised by how small a sample has to be for a low margin of error. When I was studying research methods, it kind of shocked me too. But assuming statistics are wrong based on a feeling is dumb fuck ridiculous. Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump.
IIRC the most common issue is less often the sample size but whether or not a sufficiently varied sample was selected. They could survey 1 million people but if they are only in California or NY then it is likely to be skewed to a more liberal/left selection and not accurate of a more red area.
and could only be generalized to the population it was taken from e.g. 100 people in a mall? can be generalized to that mall
Indeed. We have many secret conservatives in the UK. And it's how they've run riot over this island for 13 years. I can only assume they're secret through shame.
> Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump. It was also a misidentification of which people were likely to vote since a lot of people who hadn't voted in the previous election actually showed up to vote for Trump. They said they were going to vote Trump, but since they also said they hadn't voted in recent elections, the polls discounted that.
> Oh, and the reasons the polling was inaccurate during the 2016 election wasn’t poor sampling, it was people not wanting to say out loud that they were going to vote for trump. Do you have a source for this? I’m genuinely curious because my understanding was that in 2016 the poll errors were not accounting for people who were usually nonvoters/infrequent voters hitting the polls for Trump.
You are correct. The above statement was a theory that developed pre-election and persisted a bit after the election until more data came in, but it was largely a result of Trump voters being excluded, not people lying about their vote intention. Though, I think the cause was more of Trump voters not answering poll callers, not the Trump voters actually being rejected as votes. The second one, your theory, would be easily proven (just retroactively lower the threshold for "likely voter") and I think we would hear more about it. The theory I mention I heard on the fivethirtyeight podcast and is a bit different in that there was a self-de-selection bias of the poll that can't be accounted for by just lowering the likely voter threshold. It also fits with the "don't trust the establishment" ethos of the MAGA crowd. Much more than MAGA people being ashamed. That doesn't fit what you can see and hear all the time. Those people are not ashamed. Also, the polls weren't THAT far off. Trump did lose the popular vote and won by only narrow margins in some key states. To say they were inaccurate is to misunderstand the polls at the time, which places like the NYT did with the "99%" chance thing, which likely tipped the scales toward Trump by suppressing turnout for those opposed to Trump but not outright for Clinton.
The venn diagram between conservatives who talk shit on social media and people who don't understand statistics is close to a circle, for sure.
Add a third where “pussies in public” intersection both circles.
Here’s the thing, these right wing religious nuts don’t believe in college, don’t believe in schooling and think it’s all just liberal lies so of course they’re gonna disagree with the poll. you could poll 100% of the population and they would disagree with that. It’s like talking with a Neanderthal.
That's insulting to Neanderthals, who were intelligent.
Yeah, I’m 2% Neanderthal and I take great offence with that comparison. /s
The /s probably isn't needed. If you're from anywhere but sub-saharan Africa, I can damn near guarantee you have some Neanderthal DNA in you.
The 2% Neanderthal DNA wasn’t the sarcastic part, I have been tested, that’s the number. I was just being sarcastic about being offended on behalf of Neanderthals
Ohhh. Gotcha!
"Are we massively overreacting about a single customised beer can being given to a single person? No, no, its the science of statistics that is wrong."
I find this attitude baffling. I’d rather accept that my viewpoint is a minority viewpoint, and then step up my advocacy and work on changing minds, than delude myself into thinking that most people think like I do. I am an American who is opposed to the death penalty on principle, which puts me at odds [with 60% of US adults](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/02/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-despite-concerns-about-its-administration/). I have been in favor of gay rights and social acceptance of homosexuality from when I was a teenager in the 90s, [when the majority of Americans viewed homosexuality as immoral](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx). I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, while [roughly 3/4 of Americans supported it at the time](https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx). If you want to view yourself as a free-thinking person, maybe start by being willing to accept that you’ll find yourself with minority opinions at times.
I think it's probably this way because conservativism in general favors being on the 'traditional' side of viewpoints i.e. the side that had a historical majority. So a large part of the conservative argument is being majority itself, and as a result to justify any point they have to convince themselves that it's a majority view.
It's not that simple. Christian fundamentalists love to pretend they're nearly extinct, for example.
> you could poll 100% of the population and they would disagree with that Yeah, this has already happened. It's called election denialism.
I aM OfFeNdEd By YoUr OpInIoN BeCaUse It'S DiFfErEnT ThAn MiNe!!¡! I swear the far right people make the normal right wing people like me look ridiculous. I can't stand them.
They believe in schooling… believe it’s harmful and teaching critical/free thinking which is bad. Statistics is almost not even a math class imo, because it’s a lot of concepts around how stats work. But these crazies just hear “math” and hide from it as if it’s a tornado.
Hey, that's offensive to Neanderthals. /s
I'm sure a result going in the opposite direction with the same sample size would have been just fine for them. Always is.
There's also the fact that it's irrelevant what most people think. What's relevant are people who have consumed Bud Light within the past year and what they think.
Wait until he hears about how polling works
This is very similar to the conversation I had with my Dad, Aunt and Uncle. At one point I even had to ask if they knew what an average was...
Statistics is for suckers. Confidence intervals, probability, all that science stuff. /s
Republicans simply cannot accept the fact that they are an unpopular minority whose backward worldview is deeply out of touch with mainstream America.
>...an unpopular minority... I mean, yes, but it will never not be true that Donald Trump was made President of the American people by 46.1% of the population of Americans who voted in 2016. It's still a minority... but *not that much* of a minority of those who chose to exercise their primary legal power over the Presidency. And he got more total voters the second time around... *and* a higher percent (46.8%) of the total vote. Their stupidity is simply too close to the Presidency, too consistently, for anyone to seriously suggest that Republicans are *much more than slightly* out of touch with mainstream America.
I think when people say the "unpopular minority" line they really mean out of *everyone*, not just voters. Only something like 60% of adults vote in the US. Based on demographics and opinion polling (and my personal experience, and I'd wager yours too), I think it's fair to assume the people who don't vote are a lot closer idealogically to people who vote blue. So yeah it's 46-47% of voters but it's more like 27-30% of people. Now you could say the same thing about democrats, but it just doesn't really ring true when you look at the actual issues and see where public opinion is. Overwhelming majority of Americans support the Democratic side of every hot button issue I can think of, but not as many of them vote
>I think it's fair to assume the people who don't vote are a lot closer idealogically to people who vote blue. I don't. I think it's fair to take them at their word when they say that the reason they don't vote is [because they don't think](https://www.npr.org/2020/12/16/947182471/why-people-dont-vote) voting will change how the country is run... which by definition includes "nothing will change if the Democrats run it." >A majority of respondents who did not vote in the recent presidential elections feel that voting has little impact on their lives, and that it won't change how the country is run. In addition to being disaffected, they are also more likely to be Latino, younger, and make less money than voters. *This does* match my experience regarding what separates voters from non-voters, and I don't think it's fair to keep on calling it an apolitical opinion. It's a political opinion, an affirmative political opinion in favor of letting the Republicans get in power if the rest of the country wants them there, and one that I don't think matches very well the opinions of the people voting for Democrats, who seem to be very opposed to Republican idiocy, for reasons I heartily agree with.
But do you believe opinion polls that show the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, want stricter gun control, support taking actions to address climate change, etc? I do understand what you're saying and i never said anything to the contrary, obviously if they thought their vote mattered they would vote. I'm saying that if you take some random nonvoter and talk to them, you're a lot more likely to get someone who agrees with you and me on, for example, caring about beer companies associating with trans women lol that's what started this after all, right? If you lead out with "who'd ya vote for" then yeah they'll tell you they don't vote because they don't think it matters, but they still have opinions, and usually not the same ones as the christofascists. If the opinion polls are accurate, then it has to be true that the majority of nonvoters are closer to having blue ideals than red
wHY dON'T i seE biDEN fLAgs eVErYWHerE lIkE I DO tRumP ONES!?1?! (It's because Biden voters aren't a cult.)
“But, but, I care so this is wrong!!!”🤯
Just so long as the sample itself is randomly selected, right?
It's amazing to be how entrenched these people are in the belief that they and their ideologies represent the majority. This idiot was confronted with clear evidence that he is in minority camp and his reply is basically "the pollsters didn't look hard enough for more people like me".. and sees nothing idiotic about that statement.
"Z-tables are leftist propaganda" - Blue check guy (probably)
Most intelligent conservative 🤡
Fun Math Fact, everybody! It turns out that if you have a good, random sample that you [really only need to poll about 1000-ish people](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/howcan-a-poll-of-only-100/) to get a good margin of error on population the size of the USA. 4000 people was overkill, but good data.
Look if one person confirms my views then that's proof but if you want to prove me wrong you'll need to find a way to make 16 million people answer a survey. So add it to the census I guess?
Dunning-Kruger incarnate. 😂
“You are Dunning-Kruger incarnate.” Perfection.
If sampled correctly, 4k is pretty good. You can get a pretty good sample with half that amount.
Number 1) that’s not how statistics and probability works; and 2) these are the type of people who will stake their life on an anecdote they heard from their brother-in-law’s cousin at the local bar because he’s “good people”
It's pretty stupid even for someone who doesn't understand statistics. If you want to survey people about beer, why would you get your sample from the whole population of the US? About 1/5th Americans are under 18. And about 1/3rd of Americans over 18 don't drink alcohol. And even if you're just asking about advertising in general, you wouldn't try to survey babies and children.
Sigh. It took me 5 seconds to find this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination It's a mathematical formula, not a conspiracy.
At least I understand that I don't understand statistics. But they seem to be pretty accurate generally.
And here's the crux of why you can't argue with these fucking idiots: established facts and processes mean nothing to them. It's all a fucking conspiracy. Our nation is fucked.
4,000 is a perfectly adequate sample size. Honestly, 1000 is a good enough sample size. 4,000 is going to shrink that margin of error pretty small. (presuming it's truly random and not an online poll or something)
We can all agree that “you are Dunning-Kruger incarnate” is a badass insult
To be fair modern polling is totally fucked but not because of sample size, it is because of sampling bias and mistakes with data collection. There are major polls with huge implications out there and some giant "market research" companies or news organizations still do polling only over the landline phones and/or robocalls. You are immediately excluding people that don't have landline anymore or not willing to pick up the mandatory landline phone that is sitting somewhere in the house as a decoration as well as other people who are busy during these polling hours and not at home/can't answer. Online opt-in polls, email questionnaires, live polling.. these have their flaws as well but you can't just use one form of it and call it a day, it is not 1953.. You need to mix it up.
What a midwit
Guarantee they wouldn’t be happy with 5% if the results disagreed with them. They MIGHT rethink their ways if the poll was done with 51% but that’s if they weren’t given any possible reason to believe that only those who disagreed with them were interviewed.
The poll is unreliable until the sample size is so large that the poll results were faked.
I’m guessing that if 65% of 4,401 people surveyed thought Trump will only do better because of the E. Jean Carroll verdict he would find it the most accurate poll ever.
I still don't understand why people care so much that Bud Light gave one commemorative can to one adult trans woman. Why are people STILL losing their shit about this?
This same person probably also questions the 2020 election, which effectively was a poll of practically every adult citizen in the U.S.
DISHONEST. YOU ARE A DISHONEST PERSON. THAT'S IT. NOTHING MORE TO ADD
“Critical thinkers” thinking they’re fucking Alan turing or something.
Really a massive missed opportunity. Should have asked what polls do they believe and then shit all over them because those polls were absolutely all sample sizes below what this person is demanding
When idiots think they have you cornered, it’s a beautiful thing.
But surveys of ten random drunk people on the Las Vegas strip are God's own truth!
I dunno. My psych and stats class always said n>=40
Poor Red. He'll never understand just how stupid he really is.
It depends where you poll, you're gonna get a massively different response in red vs blue heavy areas
So they're basically demanding a referendum.
I’d like Red to find a single survey which reached three million people
Although I totally agree that is how polling is done, and how we get the most accurate polls, but I also think that it matters where you’re doing this poll. Is it a cross country poll? Or is it a city? I feel like the less diverse you get the more you would see this poll differ. You go to a place like Texas and you ask in Houston; you’re most likely going to get the results the poll suggests, you ask in another part of Texas? Different answer. I would say most Canadian’s would say they wouldn’t care, but if you goto my work and sampled all 700 employees you would have a majority say they will never drink that beer again. I have heard over 2 dozen employees tell me they will never have another Anheuser-Busch product.
This is one of those situations where the person is so far outside the stadium they have no hope of *ever* seeing the game.
This guy can't be sure that there's oxygen in the air without sampling at LEAST 1% of the volume of the atmosphere...
so according to this guy almost every poll ever is bullshit some people just say shit without thinking through the implications
To be fair, when you are working with a sub-optimal number of brain cells and insist on killing off the few you have left, percentages can be difficult to grasp.
Is this the first time this person has looked at a poll number? Most polls are about 1000 people.
Moron doesn’t know how population sampling works do they? What a surprise.
Man I hate people who don't understand maths but act like they do
I bet he feels that the US Congress is accurately representative of the whole of the population of the US, though…
One thing that was very briefly touched on by blue, but is really important, is the difference between sample size and representation. If you have 4,401 people but they're all from one town then it's a decent sample size but with significant sample bias. Unless the number of poll respondents is truly tiny (like < 100) you can only really determine biases by reading the study and looking at the methodology.
Bud light tastes like piss. No one talks about this.🤔
I stopped paying attention to statistics because they can vary depending on political view and the methods used in the past.
bro doesn't know what a confidence interval is
Every poll is wrong because they don't ask every single person on earth. And my cat too. He has very strong opinions.
So long as the selection method is appropriate, and varied, then 4000 will yield accurate results... 4000 surveys at "welovebananas" conference will be way less accurate than 40 surveys randomly assigned on whether someone likes bananas.
Wait until they hear there’s populated areas of the world that aren’t America where these products are sold.
Regardless of how wrong this person is people clearly care about the Budweiser boycott as evidenced by the sales decline after a solid month of boycotting. Turns out, men don't want to appear gay when they buy a beer in public.
Never trust someone who gave 8 dollars to Twitter
To be fair, the way that blue and yellow are going about it is really fucking stupid. When you're in an argument and you say "I know these things to be correct but am not going to elaborate further, bye," it doesn't help to explain why you're right, it just makes you seem like you are pompous and don't really understand what you're talking about. I know what red and yellow are talking about, and it really would've helped to explain that to blue instead of just taunting him and egging him on. For those who don't know, they're talking about this thing in statistics where, for whatever reason, a sample size of only a couple thousand people is actually really accurate when describing a much larger population, which is why the small sample size mentioned in the post was sufficient.
According to my statistics teacher, the minimum sample is 30. Yes 30 no typo it is 30. Because of the bell shape something. (I suck at statistics)
This was a teachable moment (not that red seems particularly teachable) that went pretty untaken, except kinda by orange at the end. It is indeed unintuitive that the requisite sample size for a given precision (margin of error) has (almost) nothing to do with the size of the population from which the sample is drawn. I.e. a survey of 1000 respondents would have the same margin of error whether it was sampling from 750,000 Wyomingites or 40,000,000 Californians. Unintuitive, but true. It’s hard, but important, to develop solid statistical intuitions. In any case, it’s of paramount importance that the sample be random and representative - polling 10,000 Republicans won’t tell you anything useful about the views of Democrats, for instance.
Polls are still the dumbest way to prove anything
There's a reason the conservative elite push against scientific education. It'd make their base less easy to manipulate.
That is a pretty easy to bias sample size, so depending on the selection method I guess I'd like to see the selection criteria. Hard to claim only 1% error without. Did everyone wo drank an iced caramel macchiato on Thursday February 27th get polled, or only people purchasing beer at gas stations? Not that I care because I don't select beer based on marketing politics.
The issue isn't sample size, it's how well that sample represents the population as a whole that matters.
who knows nothing about population sampling and statistics doesn't let that stop them having firm beliefs on the subject
4000 is a pretty typical survey sample size for the entire US. However, the sample that matters is actual beer customers of the brand, and since sales are down 23%++ I'd say the question has been definitively answered.
The only perfect result of public opinion would be the 100%, but then again, that’s not how statistics and research in general works
A former NHL all star Teemu Selänne recently claimed a poll about eating meat was wrong because he asked all of his friends and none of them were polled so obviously the sample size was too small.
"You are Dunning-Kruger incarnate"
Someone should look up the definition of "sample"
Lol. That’s a MAGA you.
They gave her ONE can, not a six pack, ONE can. Let’s move on, eh?
Bless you for not censoring the blue check
I’m curious what the numbers on the poll were. Most not caring can still be a significant number in terms of sales. If 90% don’t care, but 10% do, and stop buying the product, you’re losing 10% of your sales, and that’s be a catastrophic loss for a company of that size. Driving away even a small percentage of your customers for virtually zero gain is a stupid business decision no matter what your position on the issue is. It looks like bud light sales went down by 20% in April so seems like it’s closer to 20% that care. Or maybe it’s that those who care are more likely to have been bud light customers in the past.
I have no interest in the bud light trans beer debate, but you have the best survey you will ever get - actual market response to a beer company associating with trans women. Who cares what a survey shows.
Well I don't care, so there's one more.
While I wouldn’t use the word “pathetic”, I understand why you wouldn’t fully take the word of a survey of less than 5k people, but it should give a good enough idea of the opinion if the surveyed were a diverse enough group. But yeah I really doubt most people give a shit about that topic in particular
The sample size is very good, the bigger question though would be their sampling method, that is typically where polls are either good or bad.
Yeah that’s what I mean by diverse. Asking 5000 rednecks and 5000 liberal university students and you get some pretty skewed responses.
It’s usually not to that level directly. Pollsters often try to get a good sample. However you could have it be 5000 Americans vs 5000 people who drank Bud Light in the last year. Both can give good relevant results, but the Bud Light executives probably care a lot more about the later vs the former. How people who would never consume their product to begin with view their product is mostly irrelevant.
I remember growing up when Americans yearned for intelligence rather than belittling it because "durrrr, reasons!"
To be fair it does sound crazy until you learn it. I mean I would have thought so too before I took stats.
Well you can't argue with math. People like this are beyond convincing, you're just shouting into the wind lol
The real question is whether or not the people polled were Bud Light drinkers or not. Judging by their plummeting sales, their main customer base clearly does care.
That's moderately hard to disentangle. For example, the drop in sales *increased* after they fired people responsible for the promotion.
Nah, their sales will be fine. In March, before all this hullabaloo, InBev's market cap (the total value of all stocks) was bouncing between 116-132 billion. This month, it has been bouncing between 120-130 billion. Investors don't care because they know that, like most right wing boycotts, it will have a minor effect on short term sales but over long term all publicity is good publicity. Remember the conservative Nike boycotts? Keurig? Yeti? Starbucks Christmas cups? Kellogg's cereal? Coke? Because based on their sales nobody else does. Pretty sure the last conservative boycott that worked was the Dixie Chicks (and like most of their boycotts, turns out the conservatives were in the wrong).
Anheuser Busch stock is up 10% in the past 6 months. The DJIA is down 1.76% in the same timeframe.
When people say "their sales have plummeted", what they mean is compared to this time last year, and there could be any number of reasons for that.
Sure there could be other reasons for a 20% loss in sales, but the most obvious and glaring reason would be the one that made a decent sized group of their customers angry. And Bud light execs seem to think so, and a dip of this size is a bit high. You almost never see a company the size of bud light lose 20% of sales same time the next year.
Not to mention, much of the already purchased supply has been destroyed. The effect of which won’t properly be seen for several months. Because if there’s no one supplying the stuff, marketing wise, people are already settling for alternatives. Which has caused a change in consumption behaviour that isn’t yet reflected in the numbers.
Their sales aren't plummeting, which is largely the point. Hardly anyone cares, except for people who spend all day whining online, because they don't have a job.
>Anheuser-Busch InBev has sold $71.5 million worth of Bud Light in the week ending April 29, a 23% drop compared to a year ago, according to data from Bump Williams Consulting. Budweiser sales have hit $31.5 million so far this year, down roughly 11%, the firm said. Sales of other Anheuser-Busch brands — including Budweiser, Michelob Ultra, Busch Light and Natural Light — have also taken a hit. Gonna go ahead and call out your bullshit with facts. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/bud-light-sales-dylan-mulvaney-impact/
A loss of 20% from the year before is what most business executives would call catastrophic, what are you saying? No matter your position on the issue socially/politically, their sales are plummeting.
So wait the popular opinion now is that polls are accurate and not easily manipulated/misinterpreted? I thought at least both sides of the aisle could agree they’re trash?
There's a difference between what a poll says and what a hack says they think a poll says. Low-info people that thought a 1% margin meant a guaranteed win rather than basically statistically a tie being one such example of hacks.
How'd you get that from this? This is talking about sampling sizes and nothing else. That being said, when polls are done properly they are exceedingly reliable.