ERD50
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
The polls on this forum can be fine/fun as a conversation starter, but it just pushes my button when someone tries to come to some conclusion from the responses. They might say something like "Well, it looks like over half of the people on this forum do such-and-such".
I often jump in to say, you just can't draw any conclusions from a self-selected poll. You only know about the people who responded. To represent a cross-section of the population, you need to randomly choose from that population. You can't count on the responders as representing the whole (they might, but it isn't known)
Then I saw this cartoon, that encapsulated it well :
scroll down
(edit, the apparent original had a caption that adds a LOT - updated)...
-ERD50
I often jump in to say, you just can't draw any conclusions from a self-selected poll. You only know about the people who responded. To represent a cross-section of the population, you need to randomly choose from that population. You can't count on the responders as representing the whole (they might, but it isn't known)
Then I saw this cartoon, that encapsulated it well :
scroll down
(edit, the apparent original had a caption that adds a LOT - updated)...
-ERD50
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