91–100 of 157 posts
Hey Timothy, Emrah here. How did you set up this poll? I'd like to do one. (I answered both and found useful) Thank you:)
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll Don't abuse it!
I shall NOT abuse it. I respect this place too much, and PG is a hero of mine. I've been reading every word he wrote since the Dilbert Cube days. every. single. word:)
Interesting comparison from 1998: http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is In 1998, 22% of respondents were ages 16-20, 53% were in their 20s, 15% in their 30s and 5% over 40. As of this writing (and assuming that I did my arithmetic correctly), ~7% of respondents on this poll are ages 16-20, ~60% are in their 20s, ~25% in their 30s, and ~7% are over 40. Obviously there are a lot of caveats here, but the slight increas…
-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study
Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...
For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see
http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF
and
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz
I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/
http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf
is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What band?
A Hero A Fake I was in it for the music (looove to drum!) and possibly being a positive influence... let's just say the rest of the guys had other motives. :|
I was also in a hard rock band for 7 years, though we never signed anywhere.
Interesting comparison from 1998: http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is In 1998, 22% of respondents were ages 16-20, 53% were in their 20s, 15% in their 30s and 5% over 40. As of this writing (and assuming that I did my arithmetic correctly), ~7% of respondents on this poll are ages 16-20, ~60% are in their 20s, ~25% in their 30s, and ~7% are over 40. Obviously there are a lot of caveats here, but the slight increas…
Interesting comparison from 1998: http://slashdot.org/poll/421/My-Age-is In 1998, 22% of respondents were ages 16-20, 53% were in their 20s, 15% in their 30s and 5% over 40. As of this writing (and assuming that I did my arithmetic correctly), ~7% of respondents on this poll are ages 16-20, ~60% are in their 20s, ~25% in their 30s, and ~7% are over 40. Obviously there are a lot of caveats here, but the slight increas…
As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the date are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation doe…
There are ways of correcting for non-responders though. For example, there is the Monitoring The Future study that asks high school kids about their history of drug use. Almost everyone who is in school that day answers the questions, but that still leaves everyone who was absent that day. So what they do is they ask the kids the number of days of school they have missed so far this year, and then they correlate the number of missed days with drug usage. Using this information they can correct for every kid who was absent, because they know how many absentees there were and can figure out the distribution of how many of those kids have skipped one day of school so far, two days of school so far, etc. And then they can assign drug usage rates accordingly.
Wow, I really expected the demographics to tilt towards my age group (early 30's). Looks like I was wrong.