Sound and Fury Signifying... Manipulation

[ejuiceconnoisseur]

[h=2]Sound and Fury Signifying… Manipulation[/h] Filed under: Miscellaneous Vaping News — 5 Comments
December 18, 2013

If you’re Mr. Average Joe… sitting at your kitchen table for breakfast or (more realistically) rushing out the door ten minutes after you wake up to jump into your car, speed to work, and clock in with only seconds to spare… and you either read, watch or hear a news story that claims “44% of adults worry E-cigarettes will encourage kids to start smoking tobacco,” would you be concerned? I certainly would, if I didn’t know any better… If I didn’t have a penchant for picking apart news stories to find the lies, fallacies, and manipulative tactics hidden therein. It’s true that many of us haven’t actually been in a mathematics or statistics class in a long time, but I’m pretty sure the majority of folks out there translate “44%” as meaning “nearly half of all…” So, basically, if one were to blindly accept the claims of this article, there is sheer, unadulterated panic going on in the streets regarding the looming threat of the child-eating, demonic E-cigarette. I jest a little, but this claim is meant to cause panic. In fact, that is and has been it’s one and only goal right from it’s initial inception.

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Now, if you’re the kind of person who wants a little more information… you might click on the link to the original study, where they talk about the technical specifications of the study and survey itself. They use a lot of official sounding terminology, like “randomly selected, stratified group of adults” and “KnowledgePanel® [which] closely resembles the U.S. Population” and “The sample was subsequently weighted to reflect population figures from the Census Bureau.” Most people… even those who really are trying to check the sources of their chosen news/media outlets… will be satisfied by this information. And why wouldn’t they be? The information presented here is accurate and stands to any scientific objections regarding proper procedure and method. Nothing amiss stands out until you read the actual survey itself. Here is where you’ll find carefully crafted questions, covertly... (Click here to read the rest of my article.)

 

[bosun]

If you know the result you want, you cherry pick the participants so your "statistical results" match what you want.
If you want a glowing statistical result of "McDonalds provides good food", then you ask at a McDonalds, not at a vegetarian conference!