Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)

[Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
<zeeshanak gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras
> <felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:
>>
>> Nothing is ever perfect, but having at least some results is better
>> than nothing.
>
>  Since you have repeated this assertion a few times, I must ask: What
> if the results are all wrong and we don't have any way of knowing
> that? Would those results still be better than nothing in your
> opinion?

What do you mean by all wrong? Let's assume that the results show that
1000 people are not happy with GNOME. How can that be wrong? 1000
people responded that, the results were not somehow altered, or
boycotted, the results are the results, and that's that.

The *conclusions* based on the analysis of the results might be wrong,
but that wouldn't be a problem of the survey, and if you are so afraid
of that, you can ignore the results of the survey completely.

I for one think the survey already has enough mechanisms to determine
biases, and therefore come up with conclusions with a reasonable
degree of certainty.

But I wonder, can you come up with some example of "bad results" to
the answers proposed here, and why exactly we wouldn't know they are
"bad"?

-- 
Felipe Contreras