When it comes to renting tech kit, things can get personal, very quickly There's a reason why it's called a personal computer, and boy did this week's debate remind us all of the fact. We'd thrown open the motion that Renting Hardware on a Subscription Basis is Bad for Customers. The results were close. After all, traditional leasing has always been part of the corporate (non) ownership arsenal …
"But, cynicism, or at least scepticism, is precisely what is needed when it comes to evaluating subscription plans for hardware. They may well deliver benefits, but you're going to have to ask searching questions of any putative provider. And you're going to have to ask some pretty searching questions of your organisation to establish how efficiently – or not – you're handling things yourself."
Exactly. So the survey results exactly correspond to, what should be, the obvious answer to the survey's very question: "It depends".
So, pretty much, a 50-50 split. Possibly yes, possibly no, it depends upon your individual situation.
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I am completely surprised that The Register does NOT know how to formulate, and construct an unambiguous Proposition for the purpose have having a debate.
I am not surprised that addressing this lack of clarity and the vagueness---verging on equivocation, and double-entendre---and subsequent confusion on the part of the readers was studiously avoided in this 'results' recap.
If you're going to have a debate, Reg, do it correctly. That means: if you get ANY protests that the commenter can't understand YOUR rules of the debate, then you didn't do it right. You didn't, this time.
This is very true. I have no doubt that there are people who think renting is a great way to handle every asset, but the comments alone make it clear it's not 52% of people. However, I can explain how the vote got that way. Here's a list of what not to do next time:
1. What hardware? Some people interpreted it as only servers, and therefore being a debate on cloud versus on prem. Since some articles mentioned desktops, this wasn't the only argument. This is a basic detail of the premise that the debaters didn't agree upon, so how could the readers know what the topic was?
2. What's the actual disagreement? Renting hardware is just bad in general? Because the debaters covered lots of different reasons, most of them completely ignored by others. A narrow debate like "Renting hardware is better for the environment" is clear, but a general one works well enough if you make the debaters talk about it in general. As it was, only Tuesday's article mentioned the environmental impact, and it didn't mention anything else, so it makes it seem like that debater was addressing a different proposal than everybody else.
3. One short statement on what the debate was. As it is now, the proposal is a paragraph of background that doesn't necessarily state an opinion. The debate proposal should be a simple, non-compound sentence that clearly states a point. Ideally, the sentence is so simple that the insertion or removal of a "not" clearly indicates what the against side thinks. In my opinion, you should also replace the for/against voting buttons with this sentence and its negation. In this case, the proposal could have been "Renting desktop equipment is a bad decision". The negation would say "Renting desktop equipment is NOT a bad decision". Unless it wasn't desktops, see point 1.
4. A little less necessary, but have the debaters respond to one another. We heard four speeches and now have to vote, but a lot of debates allow the debaters to make their addresses, then ask one another questions, then summarize what they think best supports their point. I think that's helpful.
5. Either allow people to change their votes or hold voting back until the arguments have ended. Again, this is more an opinion, but I think it helps make sure people are reading more than one article before casting a vote. When I vote on these debates, I tend to wait until Thursday to do it because sometimes the against side argues a point that I didn't think they would, so I no longer support them. If I disagree with Monday's article and vote against, that doesn't indicate that I support Tuesday's point.
You beat me to point 3.
Inserting a negative into a proposal is almost guaranteed to poison the vote as it requires invoking a double negative to vote against. The proposal is in two parts, starting with "Renting Hardware on a Subscription Basis" followed by "is Bad for Customers". If you're in favour of the first part, you have to vote "No"; a "Yes" vote means you're in favour of the second part (i.e. the full question).
People need to read the full question before answering (as we repeatedly tell students before exams) but human nature is for the first part of a two-part statement to be dominant, especially where a negative is introduced. Politicians (the successful ones) know this as it's a way to improve the chance of winning a close argument. Enough people will misread, or misunderstand, the question and mis-vote the way needed to provide the desired outcome. With the question put as it was, a 48:52 split is certainly not conclusive.
"Inserting a negative into a proposal is almost guaranteed to poison the vote as it requires invoking a double negative to vote against...
"....human nature is for the first part of a two-part statement to be dominant, especially where a negative is introduced.
"...Enough people will misread, or misunderstand, the question and mis-vote the way needed to provide the desired outcome. With the question put as it was, a 48:52 split is certainly not conclusive."
Gee, I wish I'd said that.
It's almost transparent that one of the major problems with this "debate" is that The Register abdicated control from the outset...El Reg should have been "the referee", '"before the fact". It was not. It seems as though El Reg never had a formal Proposition in mind, but merely a thought, a suggestion, which was then given to the 'debaters' with the instructions to "...run with this...".
Control was then (by default) given to the two debaters by allowing them to set the parameters of this "debate". Definitely NOT the way to do it.
"88.924% of all 'statistics' are made up on the spot."---anon
Worse: Not only was the "proposition" vaguely worded, but the title and content of at least one of the articles was a statement that went opposite to the "proposition". So if you disagreed with the title, then you should vote "For", and if you agree with the title, you should vote "against".
IMO, the vote options themselves should have been clear statements. e.g.
a) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is good for the environment and good for customers
b) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is bad for the environment and bad for customers
c) Nuanced/Undecided, see my answer in the comments
I agree with others about the poor phrasing of the question with the half negative towards the end. Even a slightly close result in these circumstances is rendered worthless.
There is actually an episode of a BBC programme on this same subject. I think it was in the series More or Less and if you're lucky you might be able to find it in the murky waters of the deeply messed-up app that is BBC Sounds.
The particular issue they discuss, if I remember correctly, was an opinion poll on the Holocaust for which it appeared they'd deliberately devised a question like this in order to get a clickbait headline because such a large proportion of the population had voted that they didn't not think that the holocaust had never occurred. Or maybe it wasn't the other way around?
A short while ago, Nautica---being a closet statistician--noticed an interesting (possible) fact: given a large enough set of responses to a question, the results will almost always turn out to be 48 (or 49) to 52 (or 51). Percent, of course.
You say this ratio was close to that of "the Brexit referendum". Nautica ran his new-found 'finding' (sorry 'bout that) against several fairly large data sets, and then decided to check the largest data set on a binary question which is easily accessible to him: the last US presidential election's popular vote. Sure enough, if memory serves, Biden won the popular vote with something like 51% to Trump's 49%.
Nautica, being of the extremely modest type, decided to refer to this phenomenon as 'Nautica's Conjecture'. It is probably a well-known statistical phenomenon, possibly going by some well-known other name, but please don't burst his bubble; let Nautica wallow in his ill-informed bliss stupidity for just a little while longer.
We all would be most interested in hearing of your experiences or knowledge of similar results along these lines.
"then decided to check the largest data set on a binary question which is easily accessible to him: the last US presidential election's popular vote. Sure enough, if memory serves, Biden won the popular vote with something like 51% to Trump's 49%."
Yes, that election fits the pattern (51% to 47% including votes for other candidates), but it doesn't always hold. Just looking at U.S. presidential elections, there are several that don't end up going that way. 2008 was 53-46, 1996 was 49-41, 1984 was 59-41, and 1972 was 61-38. Source. It's not surprising that there are many binary choices that don't have a clear majority, though. The reason is that a lot of the binary choices where there is a clear majority don't need to be asked (Do you like to eat food? Would you like to suffer an injury?). I'm not sure there's anything special about a 4% margin that makes it more likely.
I think you need possible preconditions on the question -
(1) Must have a high degree of ambiguity
(2) Aims for the middle ground
Then you might model the result as a perfectly fair coin toss.
With n=1,000 samples, the standard deviation is (0.25/1000)^0.5, or in percent ~ 1.5%.
With repeated experiments, 68% of the data falls within one standard deviation, 95% percent within two standard deviations, and 99.7% within three standard deviations from the mean.
Sure enough, if memory serves, Biden won the popular vote with something like 51% to Trump's 49%.
No need to rely on your memory in this day and age for such a public statistic. I mean really - 10 seconds including cut and paste, 15 seconds with source added.
Biden Trump Other
51.3% 46.9% 1.8%
Source: https://cookpolitical.com/2020-national-popular-vote-tracker
My experience with department heads, or supervisors, is that they're only too pleased to hive off responsibility for anything under their control, and then just bask in the glory of management, in the full knowledge that the blame for anything will not land at their door. I once worked for company, where the higher management actually got it written into their contracts, that any failure of equipment that they'd signed off as being 'fit for purpose', was not their responsibility, since they had no idea of what they were signing for. It really made me wonder what the company was actually paying out large salaries for.
Being a Mac developer in a primarily Windows zone, I chose to provide my own hardware. Sure - it cost a little but there was never any possibility of dispute about who owned what.
They cautioned me that I had to keep backups, which I did. And a darn sight better than the corporate IT folks. IIRC there were three 100%-loss events on PC's during my time. Disk failure plus unusable backup ! Good one, guys. I took care of my own and never lost anything.
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