LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Messages
- 21,162
I'd argue that statistically-speaking, it's very robust, especially in a turnout north of 80%. I will confidently predict that if the outcome really is something like 53/47 (or even as far as perhaps 51.5/48.5) for Remain, all sides will accept it as a categorical "victory" for Remain, and there will be no accusations of illegitimacy or questionable constitutional validity etc.
Because all of those indicators involve people staking real money (in some cases, billions of pounds), and thus taking a genuine risk/return interest in how they express their opinion*. Polling companies can never hope to introduce that sort of factor, and we already know very well that phoning people or stopping them in the street produces unreliable outcomes.
If that's true then Scotland might have larger problems to contend with in the short term
Haha yes. I already did a "mea culpa" for that one. It genuinely was an autocorrect error
* As a form of corollary, I recall a very clever technique employed by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch following the Manchester runway fire in (I think) 1985. The aircraft's engine caught fire on the runway, and the Captain pulled off and shut everything off, but by that time the fire (fanned by a good wind) had penetrated the cabin, which was rapidly filling with toxic smoke. Every passenger on the aircraft survived up to the evacuation command, but there was a manic crush and panic to get out as the smoke intensified, and as a result something close to half the passengers died (most through smoke inhalation, though IIRC some died of crush injuries).
Anyway......... the AAIB wanted to try to model passenger behaviour when there's a need for rapid evacuation of an aircraft cabin. They filled an aircraft (737) with passengers and said something like "when we say "evacuate", we want you all to leave the cabin via the front doors as fast as you can". But everything was very orderly and "after you" and so on.
So the AAIB realised that in order to even come close to modelling the situation accurately, they would have to generate an incentive for people to get off the aircraft as fast as they possibly could. Obviously they couldn't do anything that might place anyone in jeopardy (eg lighting a fire at the back fof the cabin......), so they came up with the clever substitute of filling the test aircraft with a new set of volunteers, and then offering a significant cash reward for (something like) the first 30 people to exit, and a smaller cash reward for (something like) the next 60 to exit.
Once these real incentives were in place, the investigators were amazed to find what a difference it made. All of a sudden, people really were almost standing on others to try to get out first, and there was aggression and panic that at least went some way to simulating what might have happened in a real instance of toxic smoke filling up the cabin.
