Ambush polling

Dale Tuggy has done a post on an informal poll he conducted on his blog. I myself never took the poll since I knew the poll was a set-up.

Pose a set of trick questions, based on the pollster’s idiosyncratic definitions or hidden qualifications, then gleefully exclaim that you succeeded trapping the respondent in a logical inconsistency. Wow! What an achievement!

Dale must be deeply self-deluded if he imagines for one moment that this deceptive exercise proves anything.

Any accurate formulation of the Trinity must be carefully qualified. Key terms must either be explicitly defined, or else their definition must be tacitly understood.

In a questionnaire, the key terms must have the same meaning to the pollster and the respondent to avoid equivocation, viz.,

Hot dogs are tasty

Dogs can overheat in summer