Talk:Selection bias

Anthropic bias
A specific form of selection bias is an observation selection effect, or anthropic bias. That is, for some reason you've only observed certain evidence, so your conclusions are based around what you're able to see. You fail to notice and take into account what you don't see - that much is obvious when stated like that, but how many people think "I have never seen X, therefore X does not exist". X, of course, being something that others have observed, or at least something potentially visible such as in the Black Swan problem. It's important not to confuse it with absence of evidence. gnostic 10:35, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Truman, Dewey and the phone
Wasn't the infamous poll an example of selection bias - it was a phone poll when phones were less common and more likely to be owned by Dewey supporters? 86.146.99.34 (talk) 22:09, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Neither nor these two .edu sources mention phones, afaik. I don't know that these sources are in any way exhaustive, but they're what came up after a 5 second look on Google.


 * In fact, the first .edu source I link above specifically inform us that no phones were used:


 * According to the same source, the problem seems to have been the practice of :


 * The question still remains if quota sampling is really to be understood as a form of bias, per se. Anyhow, hope this helps! Reverend Black Percy (talk) 22:35, 25 December 2016 (UTC)