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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 5971192" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Good response Sword of Spirit.  While I agree that objective truths within social statistics can be divined, I am terribly uncomfortable with their margin of error and the ability of statistical filters to correctly adjudicate what is noise and what is signal.  A single data point gathered in hard science (the movement of a particle within a fluid, the heat trapping capacity of a molecule, the time it takes for objects to reach thermal equilibrium when a hot object is placed in a tepid environment, etc) is untainted by erroneous preconceptions, inexplicable misperceptions, "feelings" they can't properly articulate so as to derive their source, and on and on.  When you combine a number of data points regarding indifferent particles and their interactions, you can be relatively sure that if you use the correct statistical filter to reduce the impact of noise on the sample that you will derive a number resembling objective truth.  Do the same with humans and then claim that you have some measure of objective truth at your peril.  Human perception and its accompanying mental and emotional predisposition is oftentimes unreliable at best and this can, and has, been displayed through a number of experiments.  Relying on several humans to adequately represent some measure of objective truth individually (about a considerable number of moving, evolving, mechanical parts, tastes, preferences...all tainted by any number of non-objective background noise), add them together and then regress to the mean as a proxy for some verifiable objective truth about "What is DnD"...that doesn't sound so good to me.  I think if you will have better luck with a social science/marketing question when it is focused and the material in questions has its bounds constrained considerably;  Is the inclusion of the V12 an imperative for prospective buyers of Lamborghinis?  And I could find holes in this one as well (Legacy questions compromising perceptions due to the weight of cultural memes)I'm just not a fan of the question of this thread because it presupposes many dispirate, incoherent parts to arrive at some signal amidst the noise and then, presumably, uses that signal as a weapon to exclude or browbeat in a social hobby.  I'm a much bigger fan of specific, pointed questions regarding build design considerations and the implications of those on specific, pointed design goals of the mechanical interface.  You can actually have a conversation where the participants are relatively unrestrained by confirmation bias and aren't working backwards from the conclusion to the hypothesis (from "what I want/like" to "how do I get what I want/like").</blockquote>

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