Quote:
Originally Posted by grstex
But you can't say "62.5% of respondents oppose the split." That's just not true. the "mandate" is that 55% oppose the split. you CAN'T just discard 12% of the responses. That's more misleading than average from the blog.
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I agree that the statement "62.5% of respondents oppose the split" is not true. I suspect everyone does; it's math. As a side note, the statement "the respondents to the survey oppose the championsplit 62.5% to 37.5% (after removing the '"5s")" is completely true.
However, unless you have a mathematical or industry standard to support the conclusion that 62.5% is
more misleading than 4.45, I disagree. At the very least, Richard actually
told us directly what his calculation was in the midst of a discussion that already took issue with the neutrality of the 5 average. Frank left his misleading calculation to be discovered, which is a huge problem in itself.
I don't think that this was intentional by Frank. A very big part of this problem is that this is an intuitive scale on its face, but he should've done his homework before making a highly misleading and unqualified statement that included both the term 'average' and the term 'neither oppose nor favor'.
The correct 'intuitive' truth that we're looking for--i.e. what the average looks like when centered about neutral--is somewhere between Richard's calculation and Frank's average. There's no way to access it. Do you have a better method of getting closer? This is an iterative issue; Karthik took one approach, I tried
another averaging technique.