I’ve been working in Human Resources forever, it seems. But for the last decade or so as a systems and business analyst. It’s a plain and open fact that the vast majority of people have specialist skills in one or the other side of activities, the people-skills/writers/journos/PR/social worker side and the numerate/data savvy/systems thinking/analyst side. These stereotypes tend to conform with brain science and the old left-brain/right-brain models.

I am one of those very few who seem to be able to work both sides of the fence and 32 years in Human Resources backs up the theory that very few who display facility with both hemispheres.

So it’s actually a systemic problem, a human design problem, and not likely to go away until a better human is invented.

So I read all this stuff, and I watch the news, and despair at the statistical garbage that is swallowed whole by apparently intelligent people, and I despair that what seems to be the most obvious of follow-up questions never seem to be asked.

But it’s not just the statistical innumeracy, it is the next step which is really rare, and that is the ability to grasp the significance of the statistics and understand exactly what are the implications that can be reasonably drawn from that.

Refer to any analysis of the unemployment rate, or some suggestion that ‘margin-for-error’ is even remotely understood, but my pet hate is when I hear the stock market news about whether the index went up or down and the mealy mouthed, ridiculous and frighteningly superficial explanations of movements in the index.

Of course, on some days it is reasonable to say why an index went down (i.e. one very large company had a terrible day on the back of bad news with little movement elsewhere) but mostly these news fillers are just embarrassing.

And then we enter the argument about correlation and causation, and in that regard I may as well be speaking in ancient hebrew if trying to explain it to the uninitiated.

FWIW, I find that academics can be just as troubled by these nuances.

But the Essential lot don’t use phones at all.

Bit hard to explain it in full but this is the gist:

What they do use is a market survey panel of some 100,000+ email addresses belonging to a market research firm. Essential draft the questions and they are inserted into a generalised consumer survey - sandwiched in between the toothpaste packaging and cereal crunchiness.

They send out some 7-8,000 of these by email and get about 1,000 replies back, more or less. The respondents earn credits and rewards for replying. Is this polling?

It is one thing to cold call 1,000 folks right on dinner time - it is entirely another to send out a parcel of questions to the same folks week after week and see who gets back to you. Nothing random about this at all. Nor are folks who join up to earn rewards for their opinions reflective of the wider community. Even the toothpaste fellas know that.

I have no idea of how they balance this all out for gender, geography, electorates and the like. They reckon they do. But they don’t say how. I’m not sure than can given the sample size and the locations being unknown.

Anyway it’s a far cry from standard polling by phone - landline or not. In no way comparable to them in fact. Right out on its own this process.

And worthy of some serious critical analysis rather than Cr*key’s slavish reporting of what the alleged data purportedly shows about “how we all think”.

Traditionally, scientific polling has relied on ubiquitous landlines and pretty high response rates to achieve randomness and decent sample size. Nonetheless the sample is adjusted to weigh it so it is representative of the population.

The problem with the old approach is low response rates and the changing ubiquity of landlines.

One option to overcome this is the brute force approach using robo-calling to reach enough people that you overcome the low response rates, and using mobiles. But these have draw-backs in terms of increased costs and dubious randomness.

Pollsters like YouGov/Polimetrix have gone a different way to confront the problem. They invite a large pool of internet users to register in the first instance, and recruit a sub-sample and weight it in line with demographic information.

Certainly there is some self-selection with being a somewhat internet user but it’s not obvious this is any more problematic than the self-selection that already exists for having a landline in the modern age and picking up the phone during business hours.

Now, I’m assuming Essential is doing something similar to YouGov, and, if so, it’s important to note that this approach is NOT unscientific like a user poll on a website.

I’ve been flailing about for several months here on Cr*key trying to explain the “issues” embedded in the methodology of the Essential market research results which are dutifully regurgitated here each fortnight without criticism or comment.

The results to date - none from Cr*key whatsoever, but at least Essential now admit that the self-selecting respondents are paid for their opinions, and have included a more detailed explanation of their methods in each report. But these limitations and flaws are never discussed or mentioned by Cr*key’s long-suffering advertorialists. Never.

The Essential polls are simply presented - along with all the rest - as if they were a reflection of “what we all think”.

So, if you have the time, take a look at any report on the Essential website and have a scroot of their methodology (usually on page 11).

It’s not that journalists can’t count - it’s that they don’t care. It’s that they are told to puff the thing, to take it seriously and tell us we should too.

I wonder why. I’d be thinking a contra-trade deal for some free market research work myself. Luckily that’s only corrupt or unethical when Alan Jones or Murdoch do it.