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Friday, August 19, 2011

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

1 comment:

  1. Would be helpful to have a link to that which you are referring. Having to go to Google and find it is a bit strange and off-putting in the age of the blogosphere. If you are concerned with sending traffic his way just stick a rel="nofollow" in the anchor href tag.

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