“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” — Pauline Kael (this is what she actually said) http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Fac...
This is why Nate Silver, who after all mostly does his work by taking polls as a whole seriously, continues to surprise some people: They live in a bubble. They don't see who the majority is actually supporting. They are actually surprised by election results, even if the polls have largely been pointing one direction consistently for months on end.
(Silver ignores some polls and applies correction factors to others. This is due to those polls' demonstrable idiocy and/or bias, as empirically demonstrated by how far they are from reality when the real events happen.)
My point is, polls work, statistics is real, and numbers remain the primary way to determine which of two things is larger. Enter echo chambers if you want to, but don't live in one.
This is why Nate Silver, who after all mostly does his work by taking polls as a whole seriously, continues to surprise some people: They live in a bubble. They don't see who the majority is actually supporting. They are actually surprised by election results, even if the polls have largely been pointing one direction consistently for months on end.
(Silver ignores some polls and applies correction factors to others. This is due to those polls' demonstrable idiocy and/or bias, as empirically demonstrated by how far they are from reality when the real events happen.)
Wang does pretty well, too, and his models are simpler: http://election.princeton.edu/
My point is, polls work, statistics is real, and numbers remain the primary way to determine which of two things is larger. Enter echo chambers if you want to, but don't live in one.