Selection bias: the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis such that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

The art of polling is far from a new one, an established science with precedent and methodology that when applied properly should deliver, within a small margin an error, results which reflect the bigger picture of society, or a marketplace the poll is aiming to get a picture off.

Which begs the question: why does the media and various other Apple fanboys and sycophants lap up polls and surveys that are not even remotely objective and scream selection bias by even the most cursory look at them?

The common thread with all of them is that those very same poll results nearly always, without exception, feed back into the writer, or fans confirmation bias, confirming the concept that the sun shines out of Tim Cook’s rear end and that Apple can do no wrong.

A so-called survey (the word is used with reservation) released earlier this week that made global headlines was from a site called Wristly that claimed a staggering 97 percent of all Apple Watch owners are satisfied with the product.

Wow! Amazing! the watch is that good!

But dig a little deeper into the numbers and you find something remarkable: the number came from a panel group of Apple Watch enthusiasts who’d signed up to Wristly.

Can you call it selection bias when you didn’t even attempt to make a selection and instead just asked Apple fanboys who probably masturbate at thoughts of Apple products what they think of a new Apple product?

Oh, but because you can never have enough fluff from these sorts of things, the poll results are split into non-tech users and tech users, with both categories coming from the self description of users.

They’ve got a watch straight out of a Dick Tracy comic strapped to their wrists and they’re non-tech users? are we now living in an Orwellian nightmare and the English language has morphed into some sort Apple fanboy version of new speak? Or does a tech user need to have a Masters majoring in C++ to be considered a tech user?

We’d answer that question but we can’t, because Wristly provides no explanatory notes on the divide, in fact the only explanatory note it makes in regards to methodology is that 800 of their 1,100 Apple fanboy Watch users responded to the survey.

Shonky numbers

Another recent set of Apple numbers that did the rounds was the claim that Apple took 92 percent of all the profits in the smart phone business in the first quarter.

Impressive number to be sure, but it does sounds to the casual observer that it might sound more than a wee bit high.

The same survey also claimed that Samsung took 15 percent of all profits.

Head exploded yet? because even if you dropped out of high school you’d understand that the sum total of all profits in a marketplace can only equal 100 percent, but you see if you’re going for clickbait and something the Apple fanboys and the press will lap up, why allow basic mathematics get in the way?

The justification that comes from the Canaccord Genuity Group, the company behind the numbers, is even more absurd: their reasoning is that because some companies made a loss the total number of profits can be over 100 percent; this, from a company that says it’s involved in providing financial services?

No. It. Can’t.

In looking at a market share of anything, the range is from 0 percent through 100 percent. You can’t have a market share of 107 percent (Apple + Samsung’s headline numbers) because the market is finite and the top number is always 100 percent.

Losses are not profits. In an individual set of corporate financials yes you can offset losses against profits, but you can’t when it comes to markets.

That said, even allowing for clickbait adjusted headline numbers, the poll isn’t worth the toilet paper most people would use to…well, you know what, as it excludes ANY numbers from two of the biggest smart phone manufacturers in the world: Xiaomi and India’s Micromax, with the company dismissing both by saying that as they were both private companies the figures weren’t available, and that their exclusion is “unlikely to alter the industry wide profit picture.”

Xiaomi shipped 61 million phones in 2014 and is on track to ship 100 million in 2015, but they don’t matter ?

Oh, did we mention that Xiaomi publishes some of its numbers and we know they posted pre-tax revenue of 74.3 billion yuan ($11.97 billion) in 2014?

That 92 percent Apple share of profits keeps getting weaker by the minute.

Monkeys on keyboards

There are other examples that could be provided, but if you haven’t gotten the picture by now you won’t, or you’re an Apple fanboy and this whole article is pure blasphemy and the author should be burned alive on a stake.

Either way though, what they all do is reflect on the appalling state of journalism and blogging in 2015.

What’s been highlighted here are things that anyone with even a small amount of common sense could check before publishing, and yet as far as I know, no one did; no journalist or blogger is perfect, including myself, and we can all make mistakes at times, but seriously, checking the source of a survey, poll or numbers prior to publication to see if they are valid isn’t rocket science.

I understand the pressures of those in the writing game, particularly in legacy media with constant cuts to jobs and resources, but the Buzzfeed-ification of the news isn’t seeing quality journalism fall down into a well, we may have passed the well and be currently heading into the dark pits of hell as aptly described in Dante’s Inferno.

Image credit: alquimiadigital/Flickr/CC by 2.0