That's not it - nor, incidentally, have I seen any displays of scientific genius on SDN, for all that some people occasionally display brief moments of scientific competence.brianeyci wrote:Polls are about finding the MOST of a category. What the hell does it mean if a community has mostly undergraduates, if there's one genius on them? Absolutely nothing. The thing most of you kids don't realize is when Mike asks for people to show credentials, it's not because he thinks you need anything more than high school to do this... simple thing of Star Trek versus Star Wars. It's because he doesn't want to waste his time, and there happens to be a lot of morons in high school. That's it.
It has been claimed that only "uneducated kiddies" - in those words - disagree with SDN's conclusions. It has been claimed that SDN's opponents are universally uneducated, and that the educated universally are found on one side of the VS debate. This is part of a pattern of propaganda supporting the main force of the argument offered by SDN, which is about a third ad populum, a third appeal to authority, and a third ad hominem.
Leaving aside the obvious handful whose credentials are known, up to and including people producing EU material as well as an award-winning science fiction author who did his undergraduate work at Caltech and has a Ph. D. in physics. He has worked for NASA, worked as a physics professor, consulted and served with practically everyone who is everyone. It may not take a rocket scientist to talk about Star Wars, but he is qualified as a rocket scientist.
On SDN, of course, he has been called a "spectacular moron," and it seems to be claimed that he knows nothing about science fiction or literary criticism - fields he is even more widely recognized in. On SDN, it is claimed that Karen Traviss, who both served in the British military and also worked as a defense correspondent, knows absolutely nothing military tactics, logistics, or even about Star Wars, which she is actively writing. It is claimed that Kennedy, who teaches physics to high school students every day, does not grasp the high-school level physics common to the VS debate.
Examples like those demonstrate fairly clearly that the propaganda about educated individuals all claiming SW will win is false. The statistics further suggest, more specifically, that the average SDN resident can't claim a superior education to the average SFJ resident.
As of the time I went over, checked, and copied and pasted, 78 respondents have answered SDN's poll, and an astounding 21 have answered ours here on SFJ. That's about as good as we can expect here for the time being. I'll assume that not too many ill-willed trolls [or propaganda-minded moderators] have influenced the results on either board, at least yet.
We may assume, of course, that any percentage on the poll is a random variable, approximately normally distributed with a standard deviation of around ~sqrt(p(1-p)/n) (about 10% smaller in the case of SFJ, because we have a significant fraction of the population answering).
The difference between those two is normally distributed with a mean equal to the difference of the means, and a standard deviation equal to the square root of the sum of the squares (assuming that they're independent; a few people like Opecoiler are registered on both boards.) We can check what the probability is that the sign will be positive or negative by asking a calculator, spreadsheet, or table of values to spit out the appropriate cumulative distribution function for 0.
I predicted we would have no statistically significant differences between the two polls. Was I right? Let's look at the percentages from the distributions. (+/- are the standard deviations of the distributions.)
Probability that SDN has a higher percentage with a bachelor's or higher education: 32% (+/-11%)
This actually starts to resemble statistical significance here to the assertion that SFJ has slightly more educated people.
Probability that SDN has a higher percentage with a lower-than-bachelor's education, discounting "other" category: 52% (+/- 11%).
No statistical significance here whatsoever.
But is there any large difference?
Probability that SFJ has more than twice percentage of "educated" individuals: Negligible accounting for error.
Probability that SDN has more than twice percentage of "educated" individuals: Negligible accounting for error.
Very unlikely. Anything else interesting? Well, assuming that "below high school" level or "in high school" level education corresponds universally to kids:
Probability that SDN has more "uneducated kids" than SFJ: 77% (+/-7%).
I was, in other words, a bit off here. It seems that the polls do suggest some minor differences in the populations of the two boards - most notably, SDN seems to do a better job reaching out to youth - but, ultimately, these demographic differences aren't very significant.