Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 at 9:56 AM
> From: "Richard Stallman" <rms@gnu.org>
> To: "Gregory Heytings" <ghe@sdf.org>
> Cc: dimech@gmx.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > Shitty data obtained without care, attention, and skill is useless data.
>   > > Forget the weighting!
>   > >
>
>   > As the saying goes: "Criticism is easy, and art is difficult."  Could you
>   > please create and conduct a "good" survey, according to your criteria of
>   > "good"?  Or at least enlighten us, poor mortals, and explain what should
>   > have been done, and how?
>
> Please, everyone, let's discuss this without getting angry at each other.
> That is very important!  We have to _work together_ to use the answers.
>
> The survey does not have a reprepresentative sample, but that doesn't
> mean it is useless.  I wouldn't attach significance to its precise
> numbers, but even the rough quantities have something to teach us.

People should not take offense on a description that defines how things
are.   When surveys are not representative of reality and we cannot attach
to them significance, it is disconcerting when the severe effects of that
are not being taken forward.

I remember criticising geologists interpreting seismic characteristics when
the geophysical image did not allow interpretations below a certain level of
resolution.  But they did that anyway.

A useful reading is "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus 
Accident,
and the Illusion of Safety".  I am an adult living within the constraints
and responsibilities of society not a boy believing that everything is possible.


> For instance, we know that lots of users don't want the toolbars,
> but a substantial fraction do not turn them off.
>
> If we want more precise figures, I've suggested how to get them.
> But I contend that we can come up with approaches that will
> to a good job for the various kinds of users we know exist,
> without needing to know the precise size of each kind.
> We need to be clever and try lots of options.
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
>
>
>
>