Meh. Submitting highly leading questions submitted to a lousy sample group, and then throwing out the questions whose results don’t conform to the posited thesis? If it looks like a hack job, and smells like a hack job…
Nate Silver is all over it, not that it will matter. If it tells certain people what they want to hear, they’ll believe it whether or not it’s true.
Sorry, Unc, can’t agree. The questions seemed pretty obviously skewed toward a particular ideological bent. And when the people doing the “study” arbitrarily threw out the results (half the questions!) that didn’t conform to their preferred conclusion, their credibility rapidly approaches zero.
Come on…the questions were clearly subjective even by the lenient standards of the dismal science. So…in light of how a reasonable person could see more than one rational answer, it’s rather disingenuous to suggest answers to that sort of series would establish who knows what.
June 9th, 2010 at 10:27 am
Meh. Submitting highly leading questions submitted to a lousy sample group, and then throwing out the questions whose results don’t conform to the posited thesis? If it looks like a hack job, and smells like a hack job…
Nate Silver is all over it, not that it will matter. If it tells certain people what they want to hear, they’ll believe it whether or not it’s true.
June 9th, 2010 at 11:10 am
Uhmmmm yeah…that was pretty weak. And subjective.
June 9th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
questions were as subjective as the entire study of economics or any other social science.
June 9th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Yeah. If someone can’t tell that prices will go up or down based on a certain type of action…then…yeah…they don’t know much about basic economics.
June 9th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Sorry, Unc, can’t agree. The questions seemed pretty obviously skewed toward a particular ideological bent. And when the people doing the “study” arbitrarily threw out the results (half the questions!) that didn’t conform to their preferred conclusion, their credibility rapidly approaches zero.
June 9th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
Truth is an ideological bent? good to know.
June 10th, 2010 at 6:54 am
Come on…the questions were clearly subjective even by the lenient standards of the dismal science. So…in light of how a reasonable person could see more than one rational answer, it’s rather disingenuous to suggest answers to that sort of series would establish who knows what.
June 10th, 2010 at 6:54 am
And they certainly weren’t establishing “truth” about much.
June 10th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Truth isn’t an ideological bent. The guy doing the study had an ideological bent, which he used to skew the results AWAY from the truth.
Also too, throw in questions like “cutting taxes increases tax revenue” and the conservatives in the bunch would be Teh Suck.
June 10th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
An even better smackdown of this study is here.
It’s a POS through and through, and only the gullible or the non-attention-paying lend any credibility to it.