The importance of representativeness was effectively demonstrated in 1936 when a weekly newsmagazine, Literary Digest, mailed a postcard presidential election poll to 10 million Americans. Among the more than 2 million returns, Alf Landon won by a landslide over Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the actual votes were counted a few days later, Landon carried only two states. The magazine had sent the poll only to people whose names it had obtained from telephone books and automobile registrations - thus ignoring the millions of voters who could afford neither a telephone nor a car (Cleghorn, 1980).
Basically, the theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one. He unconsciously obeys the law of minimum effort because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon.
Ramon Y Cajal (father of the modern neuroscience), from “Advice for a young scientist”
(from Synapses, Neurons and Brains course matierals)
German peasant girls and women work in the field and shop with and like men. None who have seen their stout and brawny arms can doubt the force with which they wield the hoe and axe. I once saw, in the streets of Coblentz, a woman and a donkey yoked to the same cart, while a man, with a whip in his hand, drove the team. The bystanders did not seem to look upon the moving group as if it were an unusual spectacle. The donkey appeared to be the most intelligent and refined of the three. The sight symbolized the physical force and infamous degradation of the lower classes of women in Europe. The urgent problem of modern civilization is how to retain this force, and get rid of the degradation. Physiology declares that the solution of it will only be possible when the education of girls is made appropriate to their organization. A German girl, yoked with a donkey and dragging a cart, is an exhibition of monstrous muscular and aborted brain development. An American girl, yoked with a dictionary, and laboring with the catamenia, is an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted ovarian development.
Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for Girls. (1875)
by Edward H.Clarke, M.D.
Member of the Massachusetts Medical Society; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
Late Professor of Materia Medica in Harvard College, etc., etc.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded
meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
How would you understand, when for weeks, for months you desperately smash against a dead end wall, scribble away mountains of paper, cover tens of kilometres walking around your cabinet or a desert, and it seems, that there never was a solution and that you are a brainless blind worm, and you no longer believe, that it has been like this before, and then this wonderful moment arrives, when you open, at last, a gate in the wall, and another dead end is behind you, and you are god again, and the universe is in your palm. However, this ought not be understood. It must be felt.
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
We always like those who admire us, we do not always like those whom we admire.
A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.