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> "Most strikingly, 75% of guessers were wrong. You'd be better off tossing a coin than asking advice of these people." That claim above is absolutely ridiculo
by gizmo 17y ago
> "Most strikingly, 75% of guessers were wrong. You'd be better off tossing a coin than asking advice of these people."
That claim above is absolutely ridiculous. If it were true you'd do much better by always doing the exact opposite of what they propose. If you can do as well as by doing the opposite of what they guess as by doing real research, then the guys clearly know far more than a random coin.
Consistently getting 75% wrong is difficult.
The data sets are too small to do any meaningful extrapolation from. The important message should've been about falsifying claims.
When you're designing anything you have a whole bunch of assumptions. Those assumptions ("everybody knows how to do X") can be falsified by a single counterexample. But this absolutely doesn't imply that if two people happen to think X that that is a meaningful reason to assume X is correct.
- tokenadult 17y agoIf it were true you'd do much better by always doing the exact opposite of what they propose. How do we know how many possibilities there are? Maybe there isn't just one exact opposite choice. But, agreeing with Jakob Nielsen, if guessers are getting it wrong more than half the time when dealing with yes-no questions, it isn't a very good idea to guess, and guesses are poor guidance for important business decisions about Web services.
- jerf 17y agoI believe that what he meant is "75% of the guessers in this case". I admit it was phrased a bit absolutely but I don't think he wants people to take away the ideas that guessers are 75% wrong, regardless of who is guessing or what they are guessing about.