3 in 10 Americans believe armed rebellion might be necessary soon

[Old Viking]

Let's bear in mind that three in ten Americans couldn't find their asses with both hands and a road map.   I dare say three in ten believe in ghosts, little gray men in UFO's, the extraterrestrial origin of crop circles, the divine inspiration of the bible, and that toads cause warts.

How would a nationwide armed rebellion work?   Do all the rebels congregate at a few important sites?  What are the logistical considerations?  Or does one participate locally?  If so, what are the targets?  If you live in Longfart, Louisiana, you might end up with this:

"Hey, Maude, we done captured the poh-leece station, the Walmart and the landfill.  Purdy good revolushun, huh?"

""That's nice, Cletus.,  Now don't forget you gotta slop them hawgs this afternoon."

[Distind]

if you read their methodology, you would see that they called random landline phones.

Which itself is something of a problem with the distribution of landlines in the US at this point. A significant portion of people I know are excluded simply by that selection method(despite there being legal reasons behind doing it that way).

But honestly most of the reason I deride this kind of thing is that they're almost always setup to get a particular reaction. Spent twenty minutes to phrase and rephrase questions and you can get significantly different responses. The statistics is just how you make it look like you didn't design it for the reaction.

[Sleepy]

Yeah, they should've definitely surveyed more people. I don't think the national average would be quite that high, but given the several semi-recent disasters that are on everyone's mind, coupled with the bad economy we've had for several years, people are really on edge about everything.

Okay, when I posted this, apparently I didn't read what was above me. What the hell? I thought I'd posted on the first page. I swear, I'm losing it.

That said, I stand corrected about the sample size. I didn't think the margin of error would be that low.

[Sigmaleph]

@ Everyone complaining about sample sizes:

What Queen is trying to get across is that the size of the US population doesn't even enter the equations for this kind of thing*. It might just as well be infinite.

Imagine that instead of asking people how they believe about armed rebellion, we were flipping a biased coin, with some probability p of landing heads. Further, imagine that after flipping it 863 times, we had observed that 251 times we got heads. We perform some calculations, approximate some things by Gaussian distributions, and come up with an estimation for the actual value of p, of about 0.29 with a margin of error of 3.4%

Now, suppose someone comes along and says "Huh? How can you possible obtain any meaningful result by flipping the coin less than a thousand times? Why, you could continue to flip that coin for years and years and years, getting billions of results! Surely that number is completely meaningless"

That is what comparing the sample size to the size of the US population is. If you think you cannot obtain meaningful results because the upper limit of the number of experiments you can perform is really big, then you are essentially arguing that the entire field of statistics is useless. Which, y'know, if you wanna do that, it's your deal.

I'm not defending the study, for all I know maybe they had a terrible protocol for determining who they call that skewed the results, or the questions were asked in a weird way, or whatever. There is plenty of ways this could be bad statistics. But the margin of error they derived from their sample size is not. Not by much, anyway, I haven't actually sat down and done the math, but since 3% is around 1000, 3.4% for 863 is probably not that far off.



*It does matter somewhat, if you perform the exactly correct probability calculation. Not if you do statistics.

[QueenofHearts]

Thank you sigmaleph for saying what I was trying to say, but only smarter

TBH, statistics isn't quite my forte. I do have a decent amount of experience with it, being a political science major and a math whiz, but I would only quantify my knowledge of statistics as just above that of a layperson. It also doesn't help that the last statistics course I had was in 2008 and only reviewed the concepts with polls & surveys. Because of that, it can be difficult for me to explain concepts in a clear and parsimonious way. So, I apologize if I butchered some of the concepts or laws or if I explained it in a way that dropped anyone's IQ.