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With the way statistics are bandied about by politicians - usually erroneously - I don't see how one could truly be a full-fledged participant in democracy without an ability to sort good statistical reasoning from bad.
Absolutely.
For example, the reports that recent polls that showed the Bush got an 11 point lead over Kerry...
Well, first of all, out of 8 polls, only two polls showed that. The rest had a much smaller lead, or showed Kerry ahead of Bush.
Now, the deal with the high polls is that those two particular news sources didn't correct for bias in their samples, which is what all the major polling companies do.
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