GENETICALLY MODIFIED FRAUD

U.K. government "research" violates the most basic principles of social science

"The 'GM Nation' report concluded that the general public is overwhelmingly against GM technology, with feelings ranging from 'suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection'; there are, it was said, 'many more people who are cautious, suspicious or outrightly hostile about GM crops than there are supportive towards them'. These conclusions were based on quantitative questionnaires answered by 36,500 people, as well as by additional comments received. (About half of the responses came by mail, and half using the 'GM Nation?' website.) Such a large sample certainly looks impressive, considering that a lot of social science and market research draws conclusions on the basis of samples of only a few hundred people.

But the large size of the sample does not overcome one glaring problem with it. It is, as even its authors concede, a self-selected sample, and therefore is almost certainly not random. As a self-selected sample, it is probably comprised mostly of those with strong opinions on the subject. After all, if you don't give a damn, why would you go to the trouble of writing a letter to a survey unit telling them that you don't give a damn? The fact that tens of thousands of the sort of people who get worked up about GM wrote in to say that they get worked up about it tells us nothing much about the rest of the population, especially when one considers that none of the 'GM Nation?' budget was spent on advertising, and so most of the people who knew about it (before the results hit the headlines) were the activists.

After all, 36,500 people amounts to roughly one out of every 2,000 people in Britain, and you'd hardly have to ask 2,000 people before you got someone who was strongly against GM. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth mounted concerted campaigns to get their members to take part in 'GM Nation?' (and newspapers reported complaints that the public meetings held as part of the process were overwhelmed by anti-GM activists).

Consider that over a million people in Britain took to the streets against the Iraq war, but proper surveys showed us that there was not an overwhelming majority of people against the war. A survey about war attitudes that only asked people on these marches wouldn't be taken seriously - but the 'GM Nation?' survey amounted to little more than that. So we have no right to take these results to represent the general population. No decent scientific journal would take these results seriously, and there is no reason why anyone else should either".

More here. The author of the article from which the above is excerpted also has a blog

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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