cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Was just perusing some information regarding several of the more closely watched 'confidence indexes'.
Fairly disgusting stuff.
In many, they survey under a thousand people. Not even an order of magnitude away from making statistically insignificant.
A lot consist of loaded questions like "Are you happy with the current administrations policies that are improving our economic situation?", or they include complex questions the average joe simply wouldnt understand, but will respond to because they dont want to appear uninformed.
Then several apply 'weighting' and 'slimming' (their words, not mine) where they eliminate 'excessive negative or positive answers' and add a positive bias to sets of answers they 'believe may be unfairly biased to a negative'. One formula added nearly a 50% positive bias to questions the 'researchers' felt led to unfairly negative answers.
Why dont they just make up the numbers they want to publish, wordsmith a statement to that effect that most people wouldnt understand and bury it 3 layers deep in a footnote of an explanation linked to a white paper thats mentioned in the chart but only available by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to some address in Pueblo Colorado?
Sure would save a lot of time.
What grinds my coffee is that a fair number of these 'statistics' are closely watched by 'market movers', who swoop in to buy and sell based on the absolutely, completely bogus results.
Fairly disgusting stuff.
In many, they survey under a thousand people. Not even an order of magnitude away from making statistically insignificant.
A lot consist of loaded questions like "Are you happy with the current administrations policies that are improving our economic situation?", or they include complex questions the average joe simply wouldnt understand, but will respond to because they dont want to appear uninformed.
Then several apply 'weighting' and 'slimming' (their words, not mine) where they eliminate 'excessive negative or positive answers' and add a positive bias to sets of answers they 'believe may be unfairly biased to a negative'. One formula added nearly a 50% positive bias to questions the 'researchers' felt led to unfairly negative answers.
Why dont they just make up the numbers they want to publish, wordsmith a statement to that effect that most people wouldnt understand and bury it 3 layers deep in a footnote of an explanation linked to a white paper thats mentioned in the chart but only available by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to some address in Pueblo Colorado?
Sure would save a lot of time.
What grinds my coffee is that a fair number of these 'statistics' are closely watched by 'market movers', who swoop in to buy and sell based on the absolutely, completely bogus results.