---> You cannot take 500 people from an Internet forum and say that the statistical
trends seen amongst those 500 people represent the statistical trends of millions
of users. <---I can.
You said 500.
Suppose that 90% support IOD. This means
450 out of 500.
Standard deviation: this is (roughly) square root of 450,
around
21.21 .
I consider 3 standard deviations,
so the gaussian area guarantees that
my result is 99.73% accurate.
3 standard deviations is 3 times 21.21 , say 64
.
So: 450-64 = 386
450+64 = 514
386 means 77.2 % of 500 .
514
overpasses 100% of 500 .
So I can say this:
if all Internet users were informed
about
the matter, at least 77.2% of them would support IOD.
This result is
rough but accurate at 99.73% (confidence level).
>This is further complicated by
the fact that nearly everybody here >has some knowledge of the situtation, whereas
only a miniscule >percentage OF a percentage of the Internet population even knows
>what's going on here
We were forced to take a small sample.
However, statistics
can predict that this can propagate to
the whole population mantaining a similar
strong "bias".
Of course we can't be sure about 90% - this is may become
as
low as 77.2% .
About "biasing": read my previous post
(people *became* IOD supporters
after they knew IOD's histor
and situation).
Of course, this fails in the case
of the President of the USA,
since we have percentages around 50%.
This is a
rough but useful evaluation for our purpose,
even though it is off-topic
(now
you can really tell I am a funny guy).
Regards
Fabrizio Coppola
Italy