@sellsoldstough wrote:@suzieseaside wrote:
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@sellsoldstough wrote:
"That was a lot of work which must have taken several envelope backs and I congratulate you on your achievement. Can't help thinking you may have just been (almost unconsciously) looking for a certain result before you started though! "
I don't know why you say that. I didn't do any workings backwards, and I didn't know how it would turn out. So how could I be 'looking for a certain result before I started'? "
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Please don't take it personally.
It's called "confirmation bias" IIRC. It's an almost inescapable part of human nature whereby we cannot detach ourselves from our egos sufficiently to not modify our experiments or our interpretations of the results of experiments to support the preconceptions we had before we began them. If you are able to almost eliminate that in yourself then you are a better scientist than 99.9% of the rest of humanity.
But, in any case, I think it's rather ambitious to expect to get any meaningful results from analysis of such ethereal data. As you say yourself, there are necessarily a lot of assumptions being made. I think the truth is we will just never know what might have happened had things been conducted differently. People, and more so their opinions, change quickly over time and, IMO, if we ran the referendum again this week it could have swung the other way, or even further in the original direction. Which is why I said that your original post highlighted the difficulty of doing things democratically.
I thought you were doing it for the enjoyment of doing the sums rather than thinking you could really find out anything.
I will try not to take it personally in spite of your mention of bias and ego, but I think you confuse bias with inaccuracy, and you have brought up a term that isn’t relevant in this case. Inaccurate yes - I know that and have already stipulated time and time again that assumptions had to be made, and that it was only a theoretical exercise to look at the possibility of a different outcome with a greater youth turnout. Inaccuracy and lack of certainty is NOT the same as bias.
Yes I know what Confirmation Bias is (I am a scientist). It means giving more weight to evidence that confirms a hypothesis and ignoring or under-weighting evidence that discounts it. This was neither an experiment nor an interpretation of an experiment, neither was it weighted towards ‘proving’ a preconception you assume I had, and I tried to account for ineligibility. If I had assumed full eligibility and taken the high population projection data rather than the low one, that would have produced a higher possible Remain figure for the under 35s and that could be construed as being biased.
It was rough calculation out of curiosity because there are some media reports (both before and after the event) who said that the 18-24 year old turnout held the key to the referendum, given the polls were showing that a very close result was expected. It seemed that the potential was there with (an unrealistic) 100% turnout, but at 75% that you suggested I’m not convinced that that group alone could have made the difference, only that the outcome could have been closer than it was.
You say that it is ambitious to get any meaningful results from such ethereal data. Well of course it is, and I know that. First of all I didn’t expect to get any meaningful results (where did I say they were meaningful?) given the unknowns; no result from this data could be meaningful and conclusive. I didn’t conclude that the under 35s would have changed the result; the calculations (inaccuracies acknowledged) only suggested that they could have.
My mistake was that I didn’t repeat again at the end that this was no more than a possibility, but I had already stated I was just looking to see if there was a potential for things to have turned out differently if far more young people could have been persuaded to engage in the political process.
A big assumption had to be that those who didn’t vote would have voted in the same ratio of Remain: Leave. That is impossible to know without polling the non-voters to ask how they would have voted and that would never be possible now that the emotions of the group have been affected by the result.
With the caveats in mind the calculations suggested that the youngest group could probably not have changed the result on their own (which the media have implied), even with 75% turnout the result would probably have been too close to call. Therefore it would have needed more commitment to vote by the 25-34 age group for a reversal of the vote to have been possible.
All in all a pointless exercise really, done out of curiosity with no expectation of a definitive answer since this would not be possible. I thought this was fairly clear, but perhaps I shouldn’t have posted it. I’m answering this because you have implied I was biased, which means only using the available data that supports one outcome, but you didn’t support your statement with any evidence as to how my calculations were biased.
One conspiracy theory is that the date was chosen deliberately to clash with the day before Glastonbury! As if another 175,000 votes would make a difference (postal possible anyway) and plenty of festival goers are over 35.
And, as you say - a different week, day, month, whatever, a different result. Heck, even the weather affects the turnout of different generations. And above all, an honest campaign on both sides by our politicians could (or dare I even suggest here probably would?) have made a difference in the outcome.
