Quote Originally Posted by HighlanderClone View Post
Any survey done by polling firms poll a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the population.

Pew's polls, which are the gold standard, poll thousands at a time. Out of hundreds of millions of Americans.

You need to demonstrate why the forums are peculiar in its composition. And you haven't.

Finally, the people complaining back in HW and SB never got the same number of likes as current threads. A lot of the replies also just told them to get good.
Polling done by an official company such as the Pew Research Center uses the gold standard for reliability of a "simple random sample" (everyone in the population has an effectively equal chance of providing input) and the "margin of error" reported in these polls is based on the size of the sample. These forums, on the other hand, would constitute what is called a "voluntary sample" from a statistics perspective (data is obtained from people who *choose* to post here), and is recognized as one of the two most *unreliable* ways of obtaining representative data.

You are the one (or rather, the "healer strike" crowd) trying to claim the voluntary sample is valid. The onus is on you to prove it is so, not on others to prove that an unreliable approach is somehow reliable in this particular case.