From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu Jan 30 2003 - 13:57:07 MST
> (Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>):
> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> >
> >Polls like this don't even rise to the level of "factoid"; they
> >don't resemble facts in any way. You might call them "opinionoids",
> >because while they superficially look like the opinions of a group
> >of people, there's no attempt at accurate sampling or other controls,
> >so they aren't quite real opinions either.
>
> Unless you are accusing those responding of lying you have to
> grant that it is at least "real opinions".
>
> - samantha
I don't know that those responding are even human beings rather
than vote-bots, much less whether or not they are being honest, or
how many times each voted. All I know is that some piece of software
at time.com was accessed over the net 300,000 times in a certain
pattern, and that there is probably some correlation between those
accesses and public opinion (or at least the subset of the public
that accesses time.com), but probably a weak one at best. No, I
do not concede for a moment that this is an accurate reflection of
public opinion, though I agree that it's not surprizing if it is.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Feb 02 2003 - 21:26:04 MST