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#21
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Darwin, Britain's Hero, Is Still Controversial In U.S.
"mazorj" wrote in message ... "Bruce Remick" wrote in message ... "mazorj" wrote in message ... "Bruce Remick" wrote in message ... ... I still would be interested in learning if Harris only counted a response from individuals who already were familiar with Darwin and his work. Right away you run into trouble. Plenty of creationists and ID advocates think they know their Darwin. You'd have to ask a battery of questions about Darwin and evolution before you could get any idea of the accuracy of the responses of "Yes, I am familiar". For those who tested positive for knowing Darwin and evolution, can anyone doubt that the percentage of those who accept evolution would be significantly higher? So from what you say, it would seem near impossible to corral enough educated open-minded, unbiased individuals to ever conduct a meaningful poll. If you know Darwin you're out. If you never heard of him you're out. If religion plays a significant part in your life you're out. If you're an atheist you're out. If you own more than one Darwin medal you're out........... Maybe I misunderstood what you were driving at with "I still would be interested in learning if Harris only counted a response from individuals who already were familiar with Darwin and his work." My point was that in order to do that, you can't just ask the question "Are you familiar with Darwin and his work?" to screen and limit the participants to those who actually know enough about Darwin and evolution. Most anti-Darwinians fancy themselves as knowledgeable, as in "Know thine enemy" even though in the vast majority of cases, whatever they "know" comes from sermons and diatribes reviling him (and maybe a feature episode or two on the History Channel). And since most people don't like to admit ignorance even in an anonymous poll, you'll have another block of respondents who don't know jack about Charles but will say they do. Not being a statistician, I really don't know how I would handle such a survey if I wanted to get a true and meaningful result. First, I would probably rule out anyone I asked about Darwin who had never heard of him or his theories. That might be the subject for another survey. I would probably like to uncover something more thought provoking than the predictable opinions likely given by various groups of people. What trips me up here is that you shifted your stated criteria from "only including those familiar with Darwin and his work," to excluding just about everybody because in your view they cannot be "educated open-minded, unbiased individuals" if they know Darwin, if they don't know Darwin, if they never heard of him, if they are religious or if they are atheist. Sure, that excludes just about everybody, but that's not what you asked in your original question. I guess my thought was that it would seem to be impossible to conduct a random survey while trying to ensure that a cross section of society is included in it. It's not as simple as asking whether you're for Obama or McCain because the majority of people have heard of them and have developed opinions. I took the original question to mean "Did they only poll people with enough knowledge to intelligently answer the questions" or did they interview "any warm body that answered the telephone"? In most surveys you want true random selection (no, not evolutionary random selection, just statistically random selection) because you want truly representative slices of all members of the overall population. So if you wanted to limit respondents only to people who have an accurate and adequate (even if only a layman's) grasp of Darwin and evolution, first they'd have to pass a moderately tough quiz on the topic. I don't know why you'd want to do it that way. The results would only confirm that "the vast majority of people who really know evolution think it's a valid scientific model." As I said, that's already a no-brainer. Most surveys want to know what the entire population thinks, not just one limited slice of it. And in reporting the results of the poll, you would have to state your findings with the limiting condition "Among people who have an accurate and adequate understanding of Darwin and evolution..." That would be one way. I don't see how you could conduct a poll asking the entire population what it thinks of Plato when only the educated are likely to have heard enough about him to form any kind of an opinion. If I commissioned such a poll, I would want responses only from that educated population segment. |
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#22
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Darwin, Britain's Hero, Is Still Controversial In U.S.
"mazorj" wrote in message ... "note.boy" wrote in message ... "Jud" wrote in message ... Mike Marotta wrote: Depending on where you live, you can probably take an accredited statistics class at a community college for $350-$500. It will take 13-15 weeks of commitment, but you will know way more than everyone else about how polling is done and the mental exercise will help stave off senility. There are liars, damned liars and statisticians. I took 'stat' in college, and if there was one thing that I brought home from that class was when the professor stated "Anytime someone quotes statistics to you, they are lying. There are so many ways to make the statistics work in any foregone conclusion." Also, I am with the majority of the 93.4832% of the population who don't believe in polls. (No jokes about Poland please!) If your head is frozen inside a block of ice and your feet are on fire then statiscally, on average, you are perfectly fine. Billy You must be an engineer of some type. :-D We'd kid ours with the a variant of that: "An engineer is someone who thinks that if your left foot is in a bucket of boiling water and your right foot is in a bucket of ice water, on average you're comfortable." The funny thing was that 81.717% of them agreed! Statistics was a subject I covered at school. I love the TV adverts where 87% of women agree that super duper face cream with extract of skunk improves the condition of their skin and the sample size is something like 113 women questioned, such a small sample is meaningless, I get the impression that they question 1,000 women and the pick the sequence of replies that suit them best, e.g. replies 455 to 568. Billy |
#23
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Darwin, Britain's Hero, Is Still Controversial In U.S.
"note.boy" wrote in message ... "mazorj" wrote in message ... "note.boy" wrote in message ... "Jud" wrote in message ... Mike Marotta wrote: Depending on where you live, you can probably take an accredited statistics class at a community college for $350-$500. It will take 13-15 weeks of commitment, but you will know way more than everyone else about how polling is done and the mental exercise will help stave off senility. There are liars, damned liars and statisticians. I took 'stat' in college, and if there was one thing that I brought home from that class was when the professor stated "Anytime someone quotes statistics to you, they are lying. There are so many ways to make the statistics work in any foregone conclusion." Also, I am with the majority of the 93.4832% of the population who don't believe in polls. (No jokes about Poland please!) If your head is frozen inside a block of ice and your feet are on fire then statiscally, on average, you are perfectly fine. Billy You must be an engineer of some type. :-D We'd kid ours with the a variant of that: "An engineer is someone who thinks that if your left foot is in a bucket of boiling water and your right foot is in a bucket of ice water, on average you're comfortable." The funny thing was that 81.717% of them agreed! Statistics was a subject I covered at school. I love the TV adverts where 87% of women agree that super duper face cream with extract of skunk improves the condition of their skin and the sample size is something like 113 women questioned, such a small sample is meaningless, I get the impression that they question 1,000 women and the pick the sequence of replies that suit them best, e.g. replies 455 to 568. Billy That's unnecessary overkill and it can leave an obvious statistical paper trail of how the books were cooked. It's been known for years that consumer preference tests can be rigged using human factors exploits: Subtle changes in the tester's voicing, facial expressions, gestures, etc, when presenting Sample A and then Sample B. The client's soda is served only at a refreshing chilled temperature, the competition's is barely below room temperature. The client's facial tissue is nuked for a few seconds to make it pleasantly warmer to the touch than the competition's. The brightness and color of the ambient lighting is more flattering to the color of the client's product. The ice in the client's beverage is made from pristine, taste-neutral distilled water while the ice for the competition is made from some source of tap or bottled water with subtle unpleasant trace elements. Then there's the old quiz show gimmick of not so subtly interrupting the subject's decision-making process if he/she appears to be heading toward the "wrong" answer. It's not perfect but it's good enough to steer preference test results to the point that marketing weasels can play around with them. Notice how all our human senses are enlisted in their game of exploits. It doesn't hurt if the subject picks up on these cues consciously or unconsciously. In fact, usually it's better if they do. The test subjects may not be rocket scientists but they get the drift of what's going on and willingly play along because of three natural human urges in most people: They want to please the authority figure (the tester); some feel compelled to make sure they jump through the right hoops to get the honorarium for participating; and the self-centered show-offs are highly aware of the presence of a video camera (or the possibility of a "hidden" camera) so they rightly calculate that enthusiastic cooperation by over-reacting to the sponsor's sample increases the odds that they will be used in a commercial that will be seen all over the airwaves (and possibly at payment rates much higher than the token honorarium for participating). Consumer product marketers also take a page from the pharmaceutical manufacturers' playbook: Run multiple, unconnected trials using small numbers of participants and cherry pick only the best ones. Pharma does that a lot because A.) The scoring is far less subjective (the subjects either get better with greater frequency (or they don't) at rates higher or lower than the national average, and B.) It's extremely difficult to exert human factors exploits when the subjects are taking their research meds over a long stretch and usually in the privacy of their homes. So when the respondents number in the low hundreds instead of the gold standard of 1000+, randomly occurring wide variations in the test scores occur over repeated independent trials That gives the marketers a pool of (erroneous) above-average test scores. Bury the unfavorable average and below-average trials and you can easily skew the "results". Big, reputable polling houses avoid these tactics because they want to preserve their reputations. OTOH, boutique pollsters and doctors who get paid 6-figures to be one of the test administrators know what the client would like to get for his money. They're not all intellectually dishonest but the client only needs enough favorable test results - often just one will do! - to justify claiming that "Four out of five compulsive hand washers prefer the soothing action of Adolph's OCD Liquid Germicidal Soap." |
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