Introducing Margin of Error

Here's what you can expect to find here, and what you'll hear from us.

Have you ever looked at US poll and asked yourself how invested you should be? Have you ever obsessed over election models in Germany? Were you ever puzzled why working culture seems to move at a snail's pace despite the circumstances? Debated if Mo Salah is really the most clinical forward in the top 5 European leagues? Have you ever spent way too much time thinking about these on a Sunday morning (maybe even doomscrolling the news)? Well, if you have, you are definitely not alone. And if you haven't, we've dived in so you don't have to. Either way, if you were ever curious about the data behind the headlines, you are exactly who we build Margin of Error for.

The Why and the Who

For a long while, we both spent a lot of time trying to prove the other wrong. Depending on your point of view, (un)fortunately we both have a knack for looking up specific and perhaps obscure data to support our points. This started and has always been a hobby, then, through the sheer amount of weekend hours we invested, gradually became a certain lifestyle.

Then the idea of publishing our thoughts started in 2024, where we - guilty as charged - became way too immersed in the US election cycle. It was really a simple train of thought, trying to make sense of what we are seeing at first, then trying to compare the data with past cycles to ease our anxiety (didn't work), then understanding what the methodologies are and where they went wrong. From this point, one thing led to another and we started projecting our ideas and findings elsewhere too, and since we were already in the mindset of statistics, predictions and the human component therein, we looked at our other interests to find where we could dig deeper. We figured that if we liked thinking about all this, there's a chance others would too. And now we hope to share this appreciation for what the numbers tell us about various aspects of the world, how we get to them and what we might learn.

Besides our downtime, we also have extensive experience with reading data and creating statistical frameworks. We both wrote our theses on topics based on the intersection of psychology and statistics, and our day-to-day work also covers the generation of professional assumptions based on what data we have available.

And so here we arrived to the point of this post, the grand opening of our page. The name Margin of Error has a dual purpose. On the one hand it refers to, of course, the actual inherent statistical margin of error that's part of any data collection that involves humans providing the information. On the other hand it reflects our own core philosophy, that few things human are exact or perfect and there's always a certain margin of error - whether it comes to decision-making, life stuff, or projects such as this. We have to try, and we are committed to doing our best, to read information and come to conclusions, to make decisions and bet on the things we believe in, but we also have to embrace the possibility of missing a swing, and being ready to correct course when we recognize a need. And that's true for adjusting a polling model, changing culture at a workplace based on engagement data, or growing and becoming better in writing introductory articles on newly created blogs.

The What

So what can you expect to read about here? Looking back, I think we narrowed it down to a little bit of everything. More specifically though, as a next step we will be diving deep into how polling works and explaining our very own polling accuracy model. In the future we will publish other, perhaps more grounded topics as well, ranging from sentiment analyses, through workplace culture and trends, to sports (well, really mostly football).

Part of who we are is knowing who we aren't, and part of knowing what to expect from us, is knowing what not to. We aren't writing peer-reviewed academic theses for scientific journals. We offer our takes on the data, our own perspectives based our reading of data. Every interpretation comes with its own margin of error, including ours. Our purpose is to balance informed curiosity with professional talk, in order to make the fundamental topics of Margin of Error more accessible and to bring interesting data to the table: not to define truths, but to create conversation.

This project is more than just a hobby for us, we dedicated and we continue to invest tremendous amounts of free time and passion to making it happen, but this is not our full time job (yet). We carefully consider and digest each and every topic, and we want to challenge ourselves both in terms of what we talk about and how we get to that point. Quality over quantity is our modus operandi. Because of these, we will not post every other day, but we will not disappear in the meanwhile - we will be active on our social media channels with bits and pieces of engagement and we are always here in case you'd like to reach out to participate, or with a question.

The Why Now

We feel comfortable with our designs, our plans for the future and we had ample time to test our ideas, capacities and capabilities. As our home, Hungary is preparing for an election in 9 months it gives us a locally very much relevant opportunity to test our model and reach out to a core audience. We are also well ahead of the US midterms in 2026, the French presidential election in 2027 and the next UK (if we can figure out a way to meaningfully work with their system) and German elections well beyond the horizon so we can prepare for upgrading the scope of the model in due time.

We hope you'll join us for the ride, enjoy the topics we muse about and share your thoughts, ideas or feedback - we will be here and happy to hear from you.

To (a well informed) adventure!