suzieseaside wrote:

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sellsoldstough wrote:

"That was a lot of work which must have taken several envelope backs and I congratulate you on your achievement. Can't help thinking you may have just been (almost unconsciously) looking for a certain result before you started though! "

I don't know why you say that. I didn't do any workings backwards, and I didn't know how it would turn out. So how could I be 'looking for a certain result before I started'? "

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Please don't take it personally.

It's called "confirmation bias" IIRC. It's an almost inescapable part of human nature whereby we cannot detach ourselves from our egos sufficiently to not modify our experiments or our interpretations of the results of experiments to support the preconceptions we had before we began them. If you are able to almost eliminate that in yourself then you are a better scientist than 99.9% of the rest of humanity.

But, in any case, I think it's rather ambitious to expect to get any meaningful results from analysis of such ethereal data. As you say yourself, there are necessarily a lot of assumptions being made. I think the truth is we will just never know what might have happened had things been conducted differently. People, and more so their opinions, change quickly over time and, IMO, if we ran the referendum again this week it could have swung the other way, or even further in the original direction. Which is why I said that your original post highlighted the difficulty of doing things democratically.

I thought you were doing it for the enjoyment of doing the sums rather than thinking you could really find out anything.

Anyway, the authentication ticket, whatever that is, failed for this post, so I had to rescue it and re-construct it from a C&P'd version which is why it looks so strange.