Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
The data was not of course either 100% complete or accurate, nor was it claimed to be.
It was simply the best available. The data was scraped from Amazon and other sources. It was sufficiently complete and accurate to be useful and far more than a mere guess. Citing a couple of statistically insignificant instances is not sufficient to relegate it to this status, no matter how little you may like its conclusions.
What I said is that you can draw an inference from the fact that it has gone commercial and major industry players are buying it. It proves nothing except that it is safe to presume that those buying it see some value in it where you regard it as being a guess with little or no value. Perhaps some of these buyers are more qualified to judge its value than I? Or even you! It is not safe to infer from this that the data is 100% accurate. It is safe to infer that people paying for it regard it as more than a mere guess.
In any event I suppose our disagreement on this is pretty pointless now given the current situation.
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Of course the data scrapped isn't units sold, it ranking, which doesn't really mean much. Translating that to actual sales involves a bunch of guesses and assumptions. At best, you can conclude it's somewhere between 0 and 100 percent accurate and the people who actually know, aren't talking.
It's really an exercise in human psychology. It's a lot like polling. People know polling isn't accurate, it's shown time and time again that polls are frequently quite inaccurate but politicians and news media pay hundreds of millions of dollars for it because it's the only game in town. People want to know and will latch and treat whatever they can get as accurate.
TV ratings is really the same way. Billions of dollars are spent based on ratings, yet the accuracy of ratings is unknowable and likely not particularly accurate since there is no way to know exactly how many people are actually watching a show. Ratings are just an estimate based on sampling a handful of viewers who may or may not be indicative of the populace as a whole. They do their best, but that doesn't make it accurate. It's just everyone has agreed to treat it as accurate because that's the only way to make things work.