Twisted One wrote:
> Rebecca wrote:
>> Twisted One wrote:
>>> Besides, how can you possibly claim that? The newsgroup has a
>>> potential audience in the hundreds of millions. You have no way of
>>> knowing for sure how many of those people may or may not have read
>>> that post without "getting it".
>>
>> I polled them.
>
> You should know that Internet polls are inherently unreliable and
> unscientific. That is to say, they prove absolutely nothing. Nada.
> Zip. Zero. Zilch. Responders are self-selecting -- there's bias
> source #1. Anyone might lie. There's source #2. Unless a lot of
> hashing and strong crypto is used, errors will creep in from network
> unreliability, Microsoft software, and other sources. This won't
> produce a systematic bias, but it will make any results approximate,
> this destroying any usefulness for making absolute claims rather than
> "approximately half of our respondents chose Pepto-Bismol over the
> other leading brand" or whatever. So "Everybody except <name>
> believes X" and the like are right out. Also, without good crypto,
> anyone can stuff the ballot box, alter someone else's vote, or
> otherwise corrupt the process, which is bias source #3. There are
> probably more bias sources I'm missing, too. :)
Rebecca asked me, and I agreed with her completely.
Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 19:38:36 CDT
