Edgar Fiedler Quotes

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Polling is an art as well as a science, and the art of crafting good questions is still vital.

A poll survey should indicate at the outset whether it is meant to capture opinions and beliefs for preferences and practices or value and perceptions.

I'm a pollster by trade, so I'm into things that are actually quantifiable.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

The type of measure used placed constraints on which statistics can be used.

Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.

People are so quick to judge and make decisions for themselves about situations they know absolutely nothing about.

The reason there's so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know.

Those market researchers... are playing games with you and me and with this entire country. Their so-called samples of opinion are no more accurate or reliable than my grandmother's big toe was when it came to predicting the weather.

At the beginning of all experimental work stands the choice of the appropriate technique of investigation.

We don't base our opinions on the Gallup Poll.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

I don't believe in traditional, head-to-head polling.

If you look at their voting habits and their eating habits, you realize people are stupid.

I think polling methodology is broken.

When I started in the nineties, a sample size was a 4 and a 6.

There's a lot of work to be done in the polling world, and a need to continue to rethink how we do what we do. We also need to be more open to the idea that any one input - in this case, polls - may not be the only way to hear what people are saying.

I've never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

It bothers me to hear people talk about things they know nothing about.