Math Anxiety

My older sister was a horrible babysitter when I was little.  She's 10 years older than I am, and was willing to let me watch anything I wanted to watch, as long as I let her talk on the phone in peace.  It's not a new story, but mine goes like this.  I was convinced that the critters from some scary movie that I watched were now living under my bed.  Or in my closet.  Or both; it was a small bedroom.  Periodically, the general terror of it would get to me and I would force myself to stand and take the 5 or so steps across the bedroom floor to (I thought) heroically throw open the closet door.  I was afraid to look, but not looking was worse.

I am supposed to be writing about election polls.  This is my third attempt.  Every time I start, I remember me in my winter flannel 'jammas making exaggerated steps to the closet.

You see, it comes to this: I don't understand how polls work.  I mean, I understand the mechanics of how they work.  I know that the polling organization contacts a group of people and then tries to extrapolate the data based on age, race, gender and a bunch of other things.  I know that polls can be skewed in one direction or the next, based on those characteristics and the bias of the group running the polls.  Here's a nice overview.

It seems like following polls will only get you more confused about what is actually happening.  There's this poll that says the two presidential candidates are tied.  There is a margin for error that might mean that one of them is winning.  This one is a "poll of polls," and says they're tied.  This one is, famously, showing Romney as the winner.  It's exasperating!

What I don't understand is why we still care.  How does it still work for us, as a nation of people already overloaded with facts.  How is polling not just one big best guess based on a snapshot in time?  The results of any given poll seem to be so recursive as to no longer show anything meaningful; it's the reflection of the reflection of the reflection.

I've been reading a lot of Nate Silver.  Mr. Silver takes polling to another place altogether.  He has an uncanny ability to extrapolate the polls themselves.  As national poll data becomes available, Silver creates a weighted average of the data, and then makes a series of adjustments to the data based on things like bias of the poller, momentum and "likely voters vs. registered voter" information.  There's a great and complete explanation of Silver's method here, but I have to warn you: it made me feel like I didn't pay enough attention in my statistics class in college.

Even with all of the complexity of thought, all of the learned finessing, I am still not sure how it's not just something for us all to talk about, obsess over, and point to in disgust or relief.  Looking at this data, even if we know on some level the snow will melt and we'll have to rebuild the snowman, makes us feel like we can have control or understanding in a situation that is neither controllable or easily understood.  It shores us up for what comes next.

To put it another way, polls are ultimately our way of peeking into the closet.  Peeking gives us power. It's better to look and be wrong than to let your imagination run wild.  All we're missing are the 'jammas.