As a freshman in college, I had to take a statistics course. Our final project was a presentation in which we were to show how we had used the tools we learned to draw correlations. My professor gave me a high grade because I did something he had never seen before. I presented our research and then declared that there was insufficient data to show that the variables were correlated in any way whatsoever.
Polling, statistics, and the like do not usually work that way. the reason for that is simple. Someone pays them to do a poll, and people don't like to pay for something only to find out that it wasn't relevant. We like to feel that our work, our lives, our efforts produce useful work, and so sometimes we will strain at gnats and swallow camels in an attempt to find correlation where none really exists.
You see, the problem lies in how you ask the question. I learned that not everyone understood the question the way I asked it. Halfway through data collection, I had to scrap all of my data and ask the question differently. I could have chosen at that point to ask questions that would create a consensus based on either how the subjects interpreted the words or based on how I interpreted their responses. I did neither, but just because other people call themselves objective doesn't mean they are. All of my classmates, every single solitary one of them got up and told our professor that they could show correlation. He didn't buy any of their claims. He tore every one of their conclusions apart. Mine was the lesson he chose to leave with them as the semester ended. I was embarrassed; I was a freshman.
It was strange to finish an entire semester's worth of work and find that none of my data was relevant. The true relevance was that sometimes things are not related or correlated or causative. There are other variables at work that set up a circumstance, and so we can color the perception of those we poll or those from whom we collect data to a certain predetermined conclusion. In medicine, we call this the placebo effect, where we tell people they are being treated, and some of them respond as if they were even though they are taking a sucrose pill. Our media now is not really full of reporters; they are mostly people who are desperate to be relevant, and so they carefully select words or terms or conditions that will create a result they can report.
Years ago, I started the Journal of Negative Results because there is no place certain to acknowledge "wasted" efforts that show us what cannot be done. We waste a great deal of time and effort repeating work already done by others but of which there is no record. We waste a great deal of time and money hacking at the leaves of evil rather than the roots, mostly because the leaves are easier to reach and more noticeable when destroyed. That is true wasted effort. Each of our failed attempts, like the 39 combinations tried before WD-40 was produced or the 7 combinations tried before Preparation H or the 1000 filament types Edison found would not work in his light bulb, get us closer to what will work because they follow true scientific process. I have told my students for years that "Science never proves anything. It removes all other possibilities until only the truth remains."
I wasted a great deal of time in graduate school working on something that other people already knew was a red herring. Nobody reported the truth, and so I wasted part of my life, my finite time on earth, repeating a false premise. They are playing a dangerous game in Washington, in the media, by trying to say that the wheel is bad and should be discarded. If it works, why throw it away? Yet, that is what they do with our Constitution. Why do they do it? Because they are more interested in being right than what is right. That is fallacy, because the truth was true long before we started looking for it.
Most of their politicking on the fiscal cliff, gun control, and the like are leading questions. It's so safe now that the criminals, drug pushers, and psychiatrically affected are off the streets that they can take guns away from law-abiding citizens. They are designed to lead us to accept, embrace, and acknowledge their preconceived notions. That's not leadership. That's herdsmanship. Leading questions ask us about the best value that preserves our values and gives us the best chance to acquire more value. The Blue Chip Party is not interested in improving you; their policies are designed to preserve what you have. The trouble with that is that it never works. You are either actively working or subject to entropy. You can act or be acted upon. Which one you chose to be is a leading question of our time and one you must ask yourself.
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