On The Obstinate Belief In Pseudo-Science Among Our Most Sciency

Two years ago, one of my nieces sons was approached by an older woman who he didn't know and who he was pretty sure didn't know him.   She said to him his grandmother (my mother who died three years earlier) wanted him to know that it wasn't too late to turn his life around (he had become addicted to heroin) she said she told her to mention a Sacagawea dollar to him.   Which was the thing, when they were issued my mother had gotten new Sacagawea dollars and given one to all of her grandchildren and great grandchildren - she didn't give them to her own children. He told me he'd forgotten all about it, it having been when he was three years old.  But he still had the coin somewhere.  Alas, it took more than that to get him off of heroin, he had to go through one overdose that almost killed him, to be arrested and put in jail before he got clean, which he is for now, as he, himself puts it.

The older woman didn't ask him for money or even identify herself, he doesn't know who she was, today.  He's still kind of freaked out by the experience.

I was a little annoyed with John Oliver's somewhat valuable and somewhat entertaining program on "psychics" because what he really meant were "mediums" and not even mediums but a specific kind of commercial, show-biz "mediums" and he didn't know enough to make the distinction.   I don't have anything against the discouragement of the kind of thing that gets on daytime TV and morning shows which are open to all of the tricks and abuses and ambiguities that are charged by materialist fundamentalists.  I don't think banning it is any way to mitigate it.   I'd like to see some kind of financial regulations placed on the trade in mediumship and fortunetelling since, like alcohol, it's not ever going to go away.  I think if it were harder to make a lot of money out of it, it would be far less attractive to conscious cheats and even some of those who are unconscious as to what they're doing. 

I didn't listen to all of Olivers' piece because it was pretty typical of the kind of debunkery which someone who hasn't really looked into the scientific research of extraordinary experiences and abilities, even when that's done entertainingly, it's not really very helpful. 

None of that has anything to do with the controlled research into such things which, if it is controlled sufficiently, is some of the most rigorous scientific research that falls broadly under the umbrella of "psychology" but which, since it seems to violate materialist fundamentalism, is suppressed and misrepresented.  I have enough knowledge of statistics and have read enough of the research to know that, as the eminent statistician Jessica Utts and others have said, it has passed the requirements to be considered scientifically valid.

But this isn't about "psychics" or mediums or fortunetelling or even the scientific status of research into telepathy and such very well demonstrated phenomena as presentiment, it is about something used by John Oliver just about every time he does a piece and which comprises one of the most widely held superstitions of educated people, especially those who love to consider themselves as being devoted to scientific thinking, the massive fraud of opinion polling and surveys.

Pew, one of the most respected names in the business of divining and defining the thinking of entire populations, has admitted something that totally blows apart the possible scientific validity of the business they are in, though they won't admit it blows their act apart.

In 2017 and 2018, typical telephone survey response rates fell to 7% and 6%, respectively, according to the Center’s latest data. Response rates had previously held steady around 9% for several years.

While the Center’s telephone survey protocol is somewhat different from those used by other organizations, conversations with contractors and other pollsters confirm that the pattern reported here is being experienced more generally in the industry.

Well, one thing we can know about the 6 or 7% of those who answer polls, THEY ARE ATYPICAL OF FROM 94 OR 93% OF THE POPULATION.  But, Pew says, don't worry because Pew has conducted research that says that it's nothing to worry about.

But low response rates don’t necessarily mean that telephone polling is completely broken. Studies examining the impact of low response on data quality have generally found that response rates are an unreliable metric of accuracy. Pew Research Center studies conducted in 1997, 2003, 2012 and 2016 found little relationship between response rates and accuracy, and other researchers have found similar results. In the 2018 midterm election, polls – including those conducted by phone with live interviewers – performed well by historical standards. Nonpartisan polls in 2018 were more accurate, on average, than midterm polls since 1998.

What do you suppose John Oliver or anyone would say if a bunch of TV mediums got together and came up with a bunch of studies to say that everything was jake with how they made their livings because they had a success rate of 6 or 7%?  Would anyone fail to see a problem with that?   Yet the educated population of the United States overlook that and the other, many definitively debunking problems with opinion polling and surveying as it is conducted, they have no problem with it because it is assigned the designation of "science" even though it, in no ways passes even the most modest requirements of doing science. 

One of my greatest pet peeves with opinion polling and the such is the inevitable habit of thought that it encourages, to define geographic regions or groups of people based on what even a small majority of those matching that identity are reported as saying in a poll.  Opinion polling contributes, dangerously, in creating negative and self-fulfilling stereotypes.   One such example of this is the common belief that "White Women voted for Trump" because some polls said that 52% of "White Women" voted for Trump - ignoring that if that were the case that 48% of "White Women" didn't vote for him.  However, and it is certainly NOT part of the common received wisdom of this type, that "known fact" is not, in fact, undisputed.

A majority of white women voted for Donald Trump: It’s the statistic that launched a thousand narratives. “You know, I got 52% with women,” President Donald Trump said at a press conference in late September, falsely conflating the figure for white women with the figure for women overall, whom he did not win. “Everybody said this couldn’t happen—52%.”

Trump is hardly the only one invoking the stat. The idea that a majority of white woman voted for Trump has become a meme ever since the 2016 election, featured in countless arguments that make sweeping claims about its meaning. In the President’s telling, the 52% stat refutes the notion that he’s unfriendly to women. To conservatives, it proves that Trump-hating liberal feminists are out of touch with what a lot of real American women believe. To liberals, it shows that white women are complicit in the sins of the patriarchy, perhaps because they benefit from access to its spoils.

There’s just one problem with this statistic: It’s probably not true.

The idea that 52% of white women voted for Trump—compared to 43% who supported Hillary Clinton—comes from the 2016 exit polls, an in-person survey in which Election Day questioners ask people at polling places across the country how they voted, then adjust the results to match the actual tally reported by election authorities. But exit polls, which are conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of news organizations, suffer from systemic biases and are notoriously flawed.

Which, of course, won't get into the common received wisdom as repeated by people, in the media, in the general public, who either don't know or ignore the differences of reliability among the many and baroque polling methodologies which are, as well of unknown reliability.

But, especially considering Pew's ass covering assurances over why a 6% response rate shouldn't make you figure "cold reading" is probably more reliable than opinion polling and surveys, here's the interesting reason why Edison Research's exit-polling is unreliable.

Exit polls tend to overrepresent the kinds of people who are likely to stop and agree to talk to a pollster, and underrepresent the ones who don’t. They’re also conducted on the fly, attempting to snapshot the electorate in real time, so they’re naturally not going to be as accurate as an analysis that combs through voter files and other data that show who actually turned out. (Ironically, the thing the exits are worst for—determining the demographic breakdown of the electorate—is the thing they’re most often cited to illustrate.) Later, more careful analyses have corrected many of the exits’ snap judgments, busting many myths about the election along the way.

None of this will stop the Brit-atheist comedian John Oliver from citing polls, which are ever so much more sciency than science and ever more so unlike science than the research of, say Dean Radin or Rupert Sheldrake, because it doesn't matter if it's real science, it only depends on if it is called science and successfully sold as science.

There are no bigger suckers for pseudo-science than those who buy into the methodologies of psychology and sociology which, for a start, NEVER CAN USE RANDOM SAMPLES OF A GENERAL POPULATION AND SO CAN NEVER HAVE ANY RESULTS OF KNOWABLE RELIABILITY WHEN TALKING ABOUT THAT GENERAL POPULATION.   And that is when they are being as close to legitimate scientific methods as they can get, which is never very close.   Anyone who reads the rigorous study of "extrasensory perception" or, "Psi", and I mean the really rigorous stuff that gets published in real peer-reviewed journals and compares it to the general run of stuff that gets accepted as conventional psychology or sociology would be scandalized to see which is conducted scientifically and which is not.  I doubt that would matter to John Oliver who, in the end, is not willing to admit to such things anymore than Pew is ready to admit that it's in the business of creating fake facts. 

Update:  As I remember his account to me, the woman called her "Grammy,"  she was the only one in his family he called that and the only one of that description who was dead at that time.  I'm telling you what he told me.

I don't care if you believe me or not.  I know I'm telling you the truth, that's where my responsibility in the matter extends.