Ralph, et al,
Perhaps I have missed relevant responses, but it appears that folk are
missing what is significant here:
On 8/1/2013 10:50 AM, Ralph Droms wrote:
In particular, the effect of humming versus
show of hands was pretty obvious.
The fact that the results were so profoundly different should get our
attention, enough to get us to consider specifying how to measure
consensus. From the data you cited, it appears that raising hands
carries some sort of social onus, at least for some people some times,
that raising hands does not.
Perhaps that doesn't bother other folk very much but the differential
result was so extreme -- as a single-event experiment -- it strongly
suggests we should not call for hand-raising. (The likely explanations
for the difference are pretty straightforward. Whether our community of
engineers wants to believe the explanations or not doesn't matter The
data should be sufficiently compelling.)
The other question raised in my mind is why the initial result from
the hum, which did not have a consensus either way, was not
sufficient.
Exactly. This is a point of working group management that should prompt
some concern.
It's not appropriate to throw out results that were validly obtained but
yield unpleasant results, and then repeat the same query. (In fact a
repetition of a survey on the same sample population is a rank violation
of reasonable experimental methodology.)
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net