Hi Iain, On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 5:48 AM, CONNOR Iain <Iain.Connor@pinsentmasons.com> wrote:
George – on the basis of your acceptance “No one is denying those 33 members of INTA who answered the survey had those experiences or opinions.” it is inappropriate for you to persist with your previous suggestion that this evidence should be ignored.
Nice try, but what you left out of your partial quote was the "meat", namely: "What *is* in dispute is whether one should extract any truth about those experiences when talking about the larger populations, namely (1) all INTA members, and (b) all TM holders. Because of the issues with the study, it would not be credible to do so." Which is entirely consistent with what I said, and will persist in saying, namely that the proffered "evidence" has no weight (and should be ignored). The survey is weaker than "a set of anecdotes", weaker than "raised a question as to the overall validity of the survey results", and objectively into the realm of a bad survey for all the reasons previously stated (""However, if the sample of respondents is not representative of the universe from which it was selected, it will be accorded little weight" AND the issues of size, combined). One has to separate advocacy on this group from objective and scientific review. I'm pretty confident that if folks here saw that kind of "evidence" offered by an opponent in a courtroom or tribunal, they'd be making the identical arguments that I am -- and those would be the winning arguments, as they're backed by the long history of science/math/statistics. All the "pounding on the table" in the world won't turn those 33 respondents into the 300+ that might have made them statistically significant, nor fix the fact that they were not a representative sample of the INTA membership, nor the broader group of TM holders worldwide. Paul Keating later wrote: "If it had been issued by any other entity i am sure you would have laughed it out of the room" I'm confident and agree that it would indeed have been the source of great laughter (or in my case, from someone with a background in quantitative finance/math/econometrics, horror at the abuse of statistics/math, followed by laughter). Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/