John E Hayes III wrote: >Andrew Preston wrote: > > >On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 10:55:10 -0500, "John Hayes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >said: > > > > > >>> Such a poll would be useless given selection bias issues inherent to > >>>nonrandom sampling.... > >>> > >>> > >Would you expand on this a little? > >
<snip> >Second, a poll on the journeytoforever website >is a non-random sample due to the nature of individuals that choose to >visit that type of site in the first place. ... which might surprise you. It certainly surprises me. I'm not sure, and please don't think I'm trying to make something out of it, but perhaps your saying "that type of site" means you have a certain "type of site" in mind. I'd be interested to know your view of what type of site you think Journey to Forever is, and indeed how much of it you've seen to base your opinion on. What's certainly true is that the people who choose to visit it do so for a surprisingly wide range of reasons, often quite contradictory reasons. Or are they contradictory? Mark has pointed out a couple of times that the biofuels issue, for instance (biofuels is only a part of the Journey to Forever site), attracts people of widely different persuasions, to an unusual extent (and hence the heated arguments that sometimes develop). Ken has just remarked on the same thing. Others, of the opposite persuasion to Ken's, have remarked on it here too in the past, from their point of view. Anyway, I don't intend following Tricia's suggestion and holding a poll, neither here nor at Journey to Forever, I agree with you that it would be superfluous - a distraction, and probably meaningless. But NOT because the people who come here and who'd choose to visit JtF are all of similar ilk. They're a very divergent group, that applies to the list membership (more than 100 countries) and to the JtF visitors - half a million a more month from just about every country, with a really wide range of interests. I wonder how many polling agencies would manage to assemble such a sampling. >Thus, it has what we would >call "limited external validity". That is, is would do a great job of >telling you what the opinions of the people that responded but you can't >generalize from those results to a population. Without the ability to >generalize, it has little utility and, as such, is a waste of time. > >Given that most reasonable readers of the list would probably be willing >to stipulate that more than 50% and less than 80 or 90% of the list >readership is opposed to this war, it makes little sense to expend the >effort to take a poll. Put another way, even if we did a complete >census, that is, asked for and got a response for every single list >member, what would we gain? Knowing whether 25, 15, 5 or even 0.1% of >the readership supported the war wouldn't change the way we interact on >the list or change our opinions of biofuels, so why bother. When the "off-topic" complaints come up I usually say that people seldom stray too far, and when they do go off-topic it quite often brings up interesting on-topic questions that might otherwise not have emerged. Other listers have provided examples of that happening. It happens often. Though, again, I'm not going to do a poll, I'd guess that the answer to your question "what would we gain?" might prove to be something similar - it's impossible to say what might emerge, but reasonable to guess that it might be surprising. This list can be quite surprising. And it has to do with more than just our opinions of biofuels - biofuels itself has to do with more than just biofuels. Best wishes Keith >John ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/46VHAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
