Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
Twitter polls are no better than noise, they said. Concluding anything based off twitter polls is laughable and meaningless, they said. Real research is the kind that gets published in academic journals, they said. (look at that stable 2.2%!)
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
twitter polls obvs aren't perfect, but there's lots of ways to get a good grasp on their limitations and draw pretty good conclusions from their data. I think people often dismiss them because they don't have enough "science aesthetic".
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Erik Brynjolfsson
@erikbryn
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
@Aella_Girl
It’s great that the poll numbers were stable but that really doesn’t address the core concern: your sample of followers is likely non-representative in an unknown way. So we don’t really know how to interpret these results. Definitely fun though!
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@erikbryn
Glad you liked it! But they aren't representative in a pretty known way - I have a huge amount of information on the kinds of people my followers are. And representativeness only matters under certain conditions!
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Erik Brynjolfsson
@erikbryn
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Controlling for the observable characteristics (e.g. SWM age 25-30) is helpful. But even within any such group, there may be unobservable differences between those who follow you and answer vs. the general population. That makes it hard to know if the results can be generalized