What Bob said is right - and backed up by statistics.




And what does that say exactly ? That poster with less than 10 posts can't vote, won't vote or that the other 418 poster all sail exotic boats only ?

In this statement alone you make many assumptions that you can not support.



How are these two things related, exactly ? Are you suggesting that hardly any H16 sailors attend this forum while all the exotic sailors are here without exception ? That is another implicet assumption you can't proof.

How are we to tell that either 20 or 1 F18 sailors voted in this poll or that 1 or 20 H16 voted in this poll. You can't possible know which sailors voted what. And how do you know that the H16 sailors that voted didn't vote in favour op open-class racing ? What you ARE doing is looking at the result and thinking :"a h16 crew will never vote that way, therefor they must be unrepresented or the results must be wrong". However this is just silly reasoning, you don't have proof to the contrary only your own disbelieve that you are trying to square with the results. It can be just as much proof for the fact that your perception may be skewed.



So ?



And how exactly is that of inportance in this vote. Are compulsive posters more inclined to vote against one-design racing that non-frequent posters ? Or maybe the other way around ?

Are OD racers less inclined to post anything on catsailor.com than non OD sailors ?

And so on.

You bring an argument into the discussion here that is surrounded by implicet assumptions that have never been proven in themselfs.




You can deduce all that from simple things like :"There are only 53(!) members of catsailor.com that have more than 200 posts"


So how many posters of more then 200 posts must catsailor have to become representative. Or is there any particular significant reason why YOU choose the threshold of 200 ? Would 150 posters with 100 or more posts make the poll any more or any less representative ?

Your argumention is as firm as saying that I'm irritating Dutchman because my father had only 1 sister instead of 2 brothers and 3 sisters.

I can see you all knot in agreement to the last statement; but this is all voodoo arguments. They sound and look great but are nonsensical.





What a non-sense. The conclusion may well have large grey area's but any numbers of samples is enough to make an inference about a populations under the condition that MORE samples will definately make the inference more dependeable.

But what you are doing is typical for debates in modern societies. You equate the fact of reduced dependability/accuracy with the believe that the conclusion is WRONG. It is never wrong, only less accurate with less samples.

You can not possibly know what the outcome will be is all in USA (4000-5000 sailors) had voted in these polls. For all we know the result of 33 votes may just as well be spot on. There is no reason believe that the first 33 voters magically will always vote differently than the following 33- 5000 votes. They may do so but with equal probability they may not.



So ? Are cat sailors form the south-east USA more inclined to vote against OD racing than in favour. Does it have something to do with the drinking water there ? What is it exactly that you ASSUME about these sailors that makes you believe that the conducted poll is not representative ?


Wouter