Talk:Selection Bias

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I've been thinking about the whole selection bias vs. confirmation bias thing. Instead of merging these two articles together, it seems to me there's a logical difference here. If you do a poll, and you only call people at home in the evening, your poll suffers from selection bias as it doesn't include people who work second shift. This could bias the poll as people who work second shift are in a lower socioeconomic group, which will now be underrepresented. This, to me, would be selection bias, but not confirmation bias as described in that article. Maybe confirmation bias should be presented as one type of selection bias? Anyway, I still think something should be done about the duplication here. I'm willing to do the work, if we agree as to how. —Shanek 15:22, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

__I agree with your assessment. I'm not sure how to rework those, but I don't think merging them is a good idea. THere are clear differences. Perhaps if we were to tier confirmation bias and selection bias both under a topic? You tell me. Fowlsound

Well, I made an attempt at it. I reworked it to include both Confirmation Bias and Cherry-Picking. It did increase the length of the article, and I think some of the stuff down in the Discussion area may be redundant, but I do think it has a place there as people can read about the issues without having to follow the links. —Shanek 18:43, 6 May 2007 (CDT)

__Looks good so far. I may put a new topic under Logic/Fallacies etc that can link to these pages also (under one "Bias" heading). What do you think? Or should we let them sit separately how they are? Fowlsound

I dunno. It might be best in some sort of hierarchical structure, with Selection Bias at the top and Confirmation Bias, Cherry Picking, and maybe Argument From Quotation under that. But from what I've seen, that would be the only place in the Wiki that did things this way. Are there any other areas where such a hierarchy would be useful? If not, maybe Bias as a separate heading would be the way to go. —Shanek 09:05, 7 May 2007 (CDT)

Perhaps it is time to reorganize things across the whole wiki? Perhaps I shall take it upon myself to start that after I get the TeX implementations up and running (I spend way more time in the shell of the server than actually looking at the wiki) In the meantime, perhaps you're right, we should keep things consistant with the other parts of the wiki. Fowlsound