Just saw the political forum on cna 2 weeks ago. Slightly outdated but nevertheless, it offers a good enough representation of the parties...
In a forum such as this, it is easy to just list out issues and throw it out as things which the party has not done well. That has been done rather frequently by the opposition. It is always easy to say, XXX is an issue, we should do YYY. But ultimately, just like in every complex engineering system, there is a huge difference between saying and implementation. The current party has the experience in implementation, and from the way they speak, it just seems that they really know what they are talking about. In contrast, the other parties just do not give me the feeling that they really know what they are talking about. This just seems like my current job, where the locals seem to really know what they are doing and talking about, while when we draw focus to one issue, we are unable to see how it affects other issues. But we are learning.
Statistics has always been 1 major part of debates. People list figures, throw out figures and use them to explain what they mean. I.e. Lets take a simple statement to illustrate my point.
"80% of the households i visit are unhappy" This seems to present a rather cogent argument. But lets think about it.
How are the households selected? By random? or is there some selection bias?
How many households are there? You really need to understand the total population you are sampling, and then select a sample size that could actually provide meaningful statistics.
What does unhappy mean? Unhappy with a specific issue? Or unhappy about every issue? Now lets think a bit about how people think. If someone were to come up to me and ask me to list what i am unhappy about, i could definitely give a list. But if i was asked to list about things that I am happy about, well, I might just give a longer list. And it is just so natural of people to be selfish, i.e. we are self-centred and want better things for ourselves. So we just focus on anything, be it big or small that makes us unhappy, and complain about it. So the qn really is, are people really unhappy about EVERYTHING, or are they happy but just unhappy about 1 single thing?
Lastly, unhappy people != change in party. If i were to say, if a wife is unhappy with the husband, does it mean that she wants to divorce him? Or does she want him to improve himself? Similarly, it should not be assumed that citizens being happy would imply that we need more opposition parties.
Basically, all i am saying is that it is really easy to make sweeping statements to insinuate certain things. However, it is really important for us to not just take things at statement level, but rather, try to understand more of what is being said to judge whether people are making sweeping statements, or people are actually understanding totally what they are saying...
In a forum such as this, it is easy to just list out issues and throw it out as things which the party has not done well. That has been done rather frequently by the opposition. It is always easy to say, XXX is an issue, we should do YYY. But ultimately, just like in every complex engineering system, there is a huge difference between saying and implementation. The current party has the experience in implementation, and from the way they speak, it just seems that they really know what they are talking about. In contrast, the other parties just do not give me the feeling that they really know what they are talking about. This just seems like my current job, where the locals seem to really know what they are doing and talking about, while when we draw focus to one issue, we are unable to see how it affects other issues. But we are learning.
Statistics has always been 1 major part of debates. People list figures, throw out figures and use them to explain what they mean. I.e. Lets take a simple statement to illustrate my point.
"80% of the households i visit are unhappy" This seems to present a rather cogent argument. But lets think about it.
How are the households selected? By random? or is there some selection bias?
How many households are there? You really need to understand the total population you are sampling, and then select a sample size that could actually provide meaningful statistics.
What does unhappy mean? Unhappy with a specific issue? Or unhappy about every issue? Now lets think a bit about how people think. If someone were to come up to me and ask me to list what i am unhappy about, i could definitely give a list. But if i was asked to list about things that I am happy about, well, I might just give a longer list. And it is just so natural of people to be selfish, i.e. we are self-centred and want better things for ourselves. So we just focus on anything, be it big or small that makes us unhappy, and complain about it. So the qn really is, are people really unhappy about EVERYTHING, or are they happy but just unhappy about 1 single thing?
Lastly, unhappy people != change in party. If i were to say, if a wife is unhappy with the husband, does it mean that she wants to divorce him? Or does she want him to improve himself? Similarly, it should not be assumed that citizens being happy would imply that we need more opposition parties.
Basically, all i am saying is that it is really easy to make sweeping statements to insinuate certain things. However, it is really important for us to not just take things at statement level, but rather, try to understand more of what is being said to judge whether people are making sweeping statements, or people are actually understanding totally what they are saying...
posted by Blitzy at 10:06 AM
1 Comments:
did the stats thing that was mentioned in fb trigger this post lol
Post a Comment
<< Home