<<The latest Fox News/Opinion Dymanic Poll>>
In related news 89% of crack users will suck your junk for a rock.

Holy shit, I guess the majority of Americans are cock suckers.


Fallacy: Biased Sample

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html


Also Known as: Biased Statistics, Loaded Sample, Prejudiced
Statistics, Prejudiced Sample, Loaded Statistics, Biased Induction,
Biased Generalization

Description of Biased Sample
This fallacy is committed when a person draws a conclusion about a
population based on a sample that is biased or prejudiced in some
manner. It has the following form:


Sample S, which is biased, is taken from population P.
Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S.
The person committing the fallacy is misusing the following type of
reasoning, which is known variously as Inductive Generalization,
Generalization, and Statistical Generalization:


X% of all observed A's are B''s.
Therefore X% of all A's are Bs.
The fallacy is committed when the sample of A's is likely to be biased
in some manner. A sample is biased or loaded when the method used to
take the sample is likely to result in a sample that does not
adequately represent the population from which it is drawn.

Biased samples are generally not very reliable. As a blatant case,
imagine that a person is taking a sample from a truckload of small
colored balls, some of which are metal and some of which are plastic.
If he used a magnet to select his sample, then his sample would
include a disproportionate number of metal balls (after all, the
sample will probably be made up entirely of the metal balls). In this
case, any conclusions he might draw about the whole population of
balls would be unreliable since he would have few or no plastic balls
in the sample.

The general idea is that biased samples are less likely to contain
numbers proportional to the whole population. For example, if a person
wants to find out what most Americans thought about gun control, a
poll taken at an NRA meeting would be a biased sample.

On Oct 2, 7:30 am, "d.b.baker" <[email protected]> wrote:
> [Q] - “The latest Fox News/Opinion Dymanic poll is chock-full of bad
> news for the president. But on foreign policy, the results are nothing
> short of stunning. On who they trust more to decide the next steps in
> Afghanistan, 66 percent say military commanders, while only 20 percent
> say the president. Even Democrats have more faith in the military
> commanders (by a 45 to 37 percent margin). On Iran, 69 percent say
> Obama has not been tough enough, including 55 percent of Democrats.
> Sixty-one percent favor a U.S. military action, if needed, to keep
> Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Fifty-one percent think Obama
> apologizes for American too much. . . . In short, Obama has already
> achieved what it took Jimmy Carter an entire term to attain: the
> conviction of a large majority of the American people that he is not
> protecting our interests or performing adequately as commander in
> chief.” -http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/112352
>
> I don't understand. President Obama just signed an executive order
> banning federal employees from texting while driving.
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