re: #158 ggt

There’s the actual substance of the Gallup Poll, and then there is the reporting on it.

The latter is pretty sloppy, generally speaking. Most people don’t understand the fine differences between, say, Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution, and both Gallup and the reporting on the poll don’t help.

More importantly, “statistical error” is misunderstood, and the Gallup sampling method leaves one with little insight into whether there are long term trends or not, given the sample size is too small to differentiate between trends of only 1 or 2 percent per 20 years, or simple sampling errors. or just random noise.