Conversation

A RANT: Are my polls unscientific? Depends on what you mean - but largely I hear the word 'unscientific' used in place of 'does not have enough sciencey aesthetic' - for example often people say my twitter polls aren't 'scientific' by pointing to some of my joke polls 1/

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@holzprueghel

Dec 10, 2021

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@Aella_Girl

no random sampling, no science

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hope to see you similarly throwing out all the published, peer-reviewed papers that don't have random sampling!

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and

Experimental studies and surveys have different goals. Random assignment to groups to draw a conclusion about some variable, typically to test a theory. The latter is to generalize to a certain population. Your polls are not generalizable.

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and

i have literally never ever claimed they're by default generalizable, in fact i'm pretty sure i've said the opposite a *lot*

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and

Well that’s why they aren’t scientific

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and

if you define scientific to mean generalizable, then sure, they're not scientific

10:47 PM · Dec 10, 2021

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and

But they are generalizable due to sample size. One can generalize what males 25-35 who follow SW'rs on twitter think. No study is ever universally generalizable, work done on mice may not generalize to humans, work done with humans will be even less likely to generalize to mice.