Postby 661-Pete » 4 Feb 2020, 9:30pm
Yes of course this forum is unrepresentative. Did anyone seriously suppose otherwise?
Although the forum has over 21,000 members, only a handful of us are actually active, especially in the Tea Shop. We are not a statistically significant sample. And there's bound to be a liberal/left-wing bias amongst those who are committed cyclists (as most of us are, I guess), or who campaign for the promotion of cycling. Yes I know there are exceptions!
Maybe some of us are 'lefties', even! I don't mind being labelled with the word: I don't regard it as an insult; rather, a compliment. I had the word thrown at me often enough in my student days!
Yesterday we hosted our U3A 'French Conversation' group, which consists of nine people, all of us relatively 'senior'. And unsurprisingly, each one of us, to a man or woman, is utterly pro-Remain. After all we have strong Francophile beliefs. But I'm not going to claim that our group is 'representative' in any way.
But neither are the vox pops which the BBC and other media love to present to us. Once again, a tiny sample of the electorate.
Nevertheless, amongst the electorate at large, if current opinion polls are to believed (I know the Leavers will protest to the contrary!), there is, and has been for a long time, an apparent majority in favour of Remain. Those polls may all be wrong, of course, but they have been carefully sampled and analysed.
The GE result, of course, proves nothing - when only some 45% voted for pro-Leave parties...
Suppose that this room is a lift. The support breaks and down we go with ever-increasing velocity.
Let us pass the time by performing physical experiments...
--- Arthur Eddington (creator of the Eddington Number).