WHEN I WAS starting out with online commentary one of the things that really upset a lot of the college-credentialed blog-rats such as I was becoming was when I expressed my lack of faith in the scientific nature of surveying and polling. If anything my skepticism of that has only grown, the way that I know my skepticism of c. 2004 wasn't complete.
My reason for that skepticism was based in the necessity of relying on the reported thinking, experience, past actions, etc. of those who the alleged researcher could not:
1. Ascertain if the person giving them a response was telling them the truth.
2. Ascertain that if the person giving them a response was giving them an accurate answer or an inaccurate one which they believed to be true.
3. Ascertain that the same person would give them the same response two minutes, two days, . . . two years after the researcher recorded it as a datum and asserted it stood as a valid piece of the reliability of what their eventual number crunching claimed to produce and credulous idiots depended on it as durable truth.
4. Had no ability to verify that their sample was actually representative of the range of what every part of the population would give them if they could include them in their polling.
5. That such researchers NEVER or virtually never actually had a sufficiently large sample of the population they claimed to be studying.
6. That they never could have a valid random sample of a larger population because
a. They could not previously know enough about the larger population to define what a random sample of it would be.
b. Such a sample would consist of entirely voluntary respondents who one thing can be safely guessed at, they will not be representative of the part of the population which would not participate in such a poll or survey. It is as impossible to survey or poll those who would be unwilling to respond to a survey as it would be to discern which of those who would respond would be determined liars who knowingly misrepresented themselves. The character of that hostile non-sample cannot be discerned with the very methods being rejected.
And that's only a bit of what I objected to in the pseudo-science of surveying and polling which have always seemed to me to be questionably motivated to start with, those who commission and pay for the survey wanting either an obvious result or one which the so-called scientist on the make could give them and, so, perhaps be hired again to give them another pleasing result. It's all a friggin' racket, not science.
The problems of surveying and polling listed, and many others I could raise, are endemic to all of the so-called, social sciences, those which rely on the self-reporting of the internal minds of human beings, even more so those in which the self-interested, far from objectively pure so-called scientists replace their own reporting of "behavior" for the self-reporting of animals who, one thing is certain, are not humans and so no human can rationally be expected to understand to the point where such reporting is more than a wild guess or a bit of folk-lore.
That entire schools at modern universities are dedicated to such stuff and they have enormous prestige and power and command enormous credulity doesn't do a thing to erase the problems of it when characterized as "science." It shares little to nothing with the study of physical objects and their movements, chemicals, their elemental forms and combinations into molecules, etc. Medieval universities are often mocked, quite often in modern, false caricature, for the absurdities studied and written in them. Some of which, such as Ptolemaic astronomy, was actually based in direct observation and measurement and made accurate predictions at a level which far surpasses the ability of everything from allegedly scientific anthropology and ethology up to and including today's most fashionable "neuro" and "cognitive" sciences to do with the objects of their alleged study.
That they were wrong about the location of the Earth as compared to the sun, planets, etc. didn't make their actual scientific method any less an act of science, up to the point where better models which had more predictive and explanatory powers superseded them. And, contrary to the nearly universally held modern myth about that, the real enemies of the sun-centered model were the scientific establishment, not the Church. It was they who Galileo, a Catholic believer, wrote to Kepler, a Protestant believer, complaining they wouldn't even look into his telescope, not a Cardinal who was already dead by the time of his trial. TIME LINES, PEOPLE! Copernicus was encouraged to publish his findings by bishops and popes, he dedicated his great book to the then reigning Pope. Galileo ran afoul of the last humanist Pope because by making fun of him, he challenged his earthly power. It was entirely about political and economic power, it had nothing to do with science or legitimate religious belief. I've written about that at length, look at my archive.
I don't have anything to lose or gain by mocking pseudo-science of that kind, the people who pay me aren't interested if I am a heretic of the kind I am. You can't touch me. And I don't care if you say I have cooties.
Modern pseudo-science is less scientific than late medieval discredited-science. As I pointed out here the other day, secular fundamentalism, especially as enforced by the courts, the Roberts Court being about the worst since Taney, is far worse than much of religious fundamentalism.
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