Statistics Are Not a Substitute for Good Judgment

When my daughter was five, she asked me if the trees created the wind by flapping their leaves. As Yogi Berra once said, “you can observe a lot by just looking.” I suppose it is also true that you can learn a lot by just listening, especially to children. What I learned from my daughter was that correlation does not mean cause. And so it is with current polls – especially political polls – which supposedly divine the political will of the American people. But do they?

Suppose, just suppose, that the media, 85% of which proudly describe themselves as “liberals,” are using the polls to test the effectiveness of their message. My understanding is that five major companies control what we hear and read. They fill their 24 by 7 cable networks and radio talk shows with “information,” which must be obtained as quickly as possible and is poorly vetted (i.e., the erroneous reporting on the deaths in the Katrina disaster). This information is filtered through their biased world-view (i.e., the fabricated stories in the New York Times). Then, they perform polls to see if their message is being received! Based on the polls, they refine their message.

As Benjamin Franklin said, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns the press. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, further emphasizes the point:

“Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.”

So, the next time you consider the import of a poll, remember the poll was commissioned by a select group of people – people who control the channels of media communication, who have a world-view bias, who educated the respondees on the subjects for which they are requesting an opinion, and whose success is measured by ratings.

Statistics are never a substitute for good judgment!