Dear Editor,
In ‘Concerned about poll published in SN’ (May 9), Dr Anand Persaud’s questions about why the findings of the NACTA poll were published in Guyana and not published in academic journals as well as a few other comments took me by surprise. The gentleman passed judgment and made conclusions on the poll without offering any evidence to back his claims.
As “a life science specialist,” I thought Persaud would be professional in his critique of the poll and not pass value judgments.
When Persaud started penning letters in the dailies earlier this year, I was impressed with his analysis and his measured responses to others, including to Mr Vishnu Bisram. I thought Persaud had the academic and common-sense foundation to make a serious and meaningful contribution to our society. Now I am disappointed. I am beginning to wonder if he has a hidden agenda and if he is going to be just like a few others who are obsessed with critiquing other writers and determined to show off how much they know and how more qualified than others they are in commenting on technical matters like polls.
Persaud said he did a doctorate in “life sciences.” Just to note a difference, life science is based on facts, and a poll (a subject within the social sciences) is based on opinion. Persaud himself wrote a letter in KN in response to Vishnu Bisram’s explanation about how polls are conducted in which Persaud argued that a poll and science should not be likened to each other. Yet he commits the blunder he warned about. He now is arguing that a poll should be based on fact. No Dr Persaud! A poll is based on opinion that cannot be tested in a science laboratory because the opinion regularly changes. It is a value judgment that is not static.
If Persaud has been reading about opinion polls, he would know that when a poll is conducted, it is obvious that people will be interviewed randomly. If Mr Bisram has a near 100% accuracy in his prediction of elections, doesn’t Persaud think Bisram knew what he was doing? With regards to how margins of error are measured, with a doctorate in the life sciences, I am astonished that Persaud has never heard of standard deviation in his research. From my understanding of polls, that is the basis of margin of error. Why he has chosen to discredit Bisram’s work is beyond me, but his bias is clear. I wonder if Persaud who lives in America writes to the NY Daily News, NY Post, NY Times, NY Newsday, NY Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, and hundreds of other newspapers querying why they carry the findings of polls. Has he ever written to hundreds of pollsters querying why their polls are not published in peer-reviewed journals? Does he write to the newspapers or the pollsters asking them how the polls were conducted and how they chose the people they interviewed? Does he ask them how the sample was obtained and whether they ask only political people or people at random? If not, why then does he scrutinize Bisram’s poll? If Persaud does not feel it necessary to write to American newspapers and pollsters about their polls, why is it his concern to want to know the details of Bisram’s polls? It appears that Persaud has quickly joined the bandwagon of ‘crabs in a barrel’ – bringing down instead of encouraging others in making them better.
Persaud says that the data obtained by the poll is not accurate. How does Persaud come to such a conclusion? Where is the evidence? Scientists are trained to provide evidence on their conclusions. Did Persaud conduct a survey and are his findings different from the NACTA poll? Persaud leaves more questions than answers in his attack on Bisram’s latest poll.
Yours faithfully,
Tyrone Ketwaru
