» How Your Nielsen Ratings Sausage Is Made
The notes around this entry - which relates to this old io9 post - seem to be about half intelligent people who know about sampling and about half equally intelligent people who don’t. It’s helping crystallise a bunch of thoughts about aggregation, representation, and people’s emotional relationship to data. Whether I get round to writing them up is, of course, another matter (promise I’ll do the second part of the gaming post first, OK!).
For now though, it’s always worth remembering that the argument “1000 people can’t possibly represent 10 million” has a powerful instinctive appeal that endures no matter what researchers say, and worth thinking why that is.
