Don't always trust the polls

I admit to trust polls a lot. Sure, people poo-poo them, but I often get the sense that it's a more populist kind of response (you can't trust those darn polls) than an intellectual one. Well, Nate Silver does an analysis of a recent poll showing Oklahoma high school students to be awfully dumb, and he does a very good job of debunking it. Of course, the post is classic Nate - don't read it unless you've put on your Stephen Hawking thinking cap first, or you'll be very very sorry :-)

I guess what I mean by posting this is the following. Don't trust individual polls, especially when they shock. It's better to look at the aggregate of polling, so that the good tend to even out the bad. That's why we like the way Pollster.com looks at numbers - they often aggregate all the poll results, like with Obama's approval rating, so you can see not just the trend, but you can also see which polls are a bit goofy. (Speaking of which, I though his approval had gone up - not doing so well, again.)