Selling fantasy to consumers has always been more profitable than providing accurate information.
Ah, so you DO understand what marketers do!
:d
I hope that you also can appreciate that humans (real humans, not statistical humans) buy products, goods, and services based on "fantasy" over "accuracy" whenever given a choice between the two. They choose their cereal based on it, their soft drink, there shampoo, their car, their clothes, their beerand their deodorant based on fantasy, rather than accurate information. In fact, long before there were such statistics (or marketing) - and right up until this very day - people choose things like their spouse, their political leaders, and even their gods based on "irrational impulses" and fantasy rather than accurate information.
I'm not really sure I understand your "nobler-than-thou" attitude about statistics as compared to "witless" marketing. I have a tremendous appreciation for statistics. It seems, however that you don't have as much appreciation for their actual, real-world application as I do.
I notice that you're in NJ. If you teach/taught applied statistics or OR at one of the two NJ universities where I did my graduate and post-graduate work in the early 1990s... perhaps I actually did "sit through" one of your classes? The irony of you describing students as "sitting through" a course with the word "applied" in the name is not lost on you. Or the larger irony that nothing taught in a lecture hall is ever actually "applied" in that lecture hall, but rather the application of the things you teach is done out in the world. The ultimate irony, however, is the possibility that I - or someone like me - once sat in your classroom and now use what you taught me to help convince you that your teeth would be whiter if you bought "brand x" toothpaste or that chicks would dig you more if you drove a certain car, or that you would look cooler in the sneakers you bought, or that you should vote for candidate X, or use a certain brand of dive gear over another. (Perhaps, even, I should have specifically thanked you in accepting one of those awards?)
Maybe you can go over to the marketing department at whatever school it is that lucky students get to "sit through" your classes in applied statistics, and ask the marketing faculty - if you can dane to be in their presence for a bit - to explain to you how statistics are applied in such witless pursuits as product development, positioning, advertising, pricing, packaging, media planning, distribution channel selection, etc, etc.
---------- Post added February 27th, 2014 at 10:42 AM ----------
It sounds like the whole point (after further clarification) was more a characterization of whether people actually act and believe as they publicly espouse. It's pretty much common knowledge that they don't, even when they think they do. I suspect this just confirms that but I can't tell anything from the results because we don't see the breakdown of the specific questions for a given respondent.
The point was not to "characterization whether people actually act and believe as they publicly espouse." The point of the survey was to see if there was anything interesting to be gleaned from a look at people's beliefs that scuba diving is "an adventure" and seeing if that is different for different ages, experience, cert levels, and/or has it changed over time. The point of the chose methodolgy, however, was to
take into account the fact that people often do not, will not, or simply cannot tell you what they actually believe/thing/do.
---------- Post added February 27th, 2014 at 10:56 AM ----------
Ray,
Where did you recruit people to respond to this poll? Was it a cross-section of divers or a cross section of Subaboard users?
R..
Survey was posted here on SB, on a few other diving web-boards, and shared and re-shared by and among divers on FB. It appears that approximately 50% of the respondents came from SB, based on my ability to see when surveys were completed vs when/where links to it were posted. Though many of the people that came from FB and other boards could be SB members as well. No way to tell. As mentioned in the first post, this has significant implications for the results. Also not that this sort of dynamic in general is why market researchers will (should) report their results by saying "respondents think/feel/say/do" rather than "divers think/feel/say/do" since you can only draw conclusions about "respondents" rather than the population from which the respondent pool was drawn. To the point where I wouldn't even use the word "cross-section of SB members" because even that would assume that the SBers who responded were actually representative of all SBers. Lots of reasons why that's not likely to be true. We call this "Respondent Bias" and "Selection Bias."
Respondent Bias - there's a mindset of people who respond the surveys/etc. Some people just dont respond. Since there's something different about them relative to participation in the study... it's fair to assume that there are other things that are different about them compared to the people who did respond.
Selection Bias - even if you somehow elimated respondent bias, you still have the problem of inherent bias based on where you looked for people to respond. I posted the survey only in Basic Scuba discussions. Therefore, it is unlikely (impossible?) that SBers who never or infrequently enter that forum to have taken the survey. It was only posted in January. So SBers who only think about diving in warm weather months - and visit SB, or not, accordingly - would be under-represented in the pool. Etc.
Ultimately I would say the survey was conducted among "active divers who have a high degree of participation in on-line/social media sites related to discussions of scuba diving."
Pretty easy to understand potential skews in the responses based on that, huh? :shocked2:
