Formal inference will provide reasonably reliable
answers. If the poll was used to predict the outcome of the next election (future
process), the study then becomes analytic. Many, if not most, important problems
require using data from current processes or populations to make predictions about
the likely behavior of future processes or populations. There are no statistically
reliable ways of doing this. Our measures of uncertainty reflect uncertainty about the
true characteristics of the current process, thus understating rational levels of
uncertainty about the future process. The validity of extrapolation to future
processes can be justified only by contextual knowledge of the situation.