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I hope, dear rarity, that the syntax will be to your tastes. I heard you like well-classified references.

Le thread to discuss stuff unless you want to do it here. That's fine too.

Luna

Fantastic work Luna! It is scientifically concise, clear, unbiased, and well researched. Looks like an A to me! Hopefully Rarity doesn't go too postal with this.

My my my my MY. That certainly was a well written essay. I definitely liked how you compared 'Love and Tolerance' to 'Pleasure' and 'Happiness'.

There were two problems I did see though.

First, you interviewed people, that's great. A total of 8 people. Well... that just seemed like too small of a sample number to get an accurate reading. I'm not saying that you had to go out and interview about fifty people, but I do think that you could have done something to increase your sample pool for what people think about Love and Tolerance. Perhaps a survey of the community or something, I dunno. Just seemed like a really small sample size to me.

Second, you cited your sources. That's awesome. But you also openly admitted to getting information off of wiki's and you even cited Wikipedia and the Friendship is Magic Wiki. While Wiki's are normally a good source of information, they are flawed by the fact that they can be edited by anyone at any time (With a few exceptions such as the Earth page on Wikipedia, semi-protected solely to prevent people going on there and changing the whole entry to 'Mostly Harmless'). This easily makes them unreliable sources, as what you go in to read might not be the same thing that I read when I go to check your source.

That's my criticism. Otherwise it's a brilliant essay.

A quite fascinating read, Luna. I'm glad I was able to help you out with it! Sometimes we Bronies can get swept up in our own little world, so I am glad that there are reasonable people such as yourself that can give us an outside perspective.

I do agree that if possible, you should try to gather opinions of more people in the community. Perhaps you could use a simple survey, with multiple choice answers. I'm quite interested to know how serious the average Brony is regarding the "love and tolerance" philosophy.

Allow me to explain my choices, then, Rarity.

On only 8 persons :
There are two reasons. The first one is that, as explained in the text, i didn't went for a quantitative but a qualitative analysis. 8 is even a bit too much. 4 would be best according to some reputed sociologists. My opinion was mostly made by the threads and comments reading, while the interview helped to confirm some of my suspicions. Even if 8 seems small, it's actualy not that problematic, for a qualitative study.
Why not a quantitavite study, then ? Indeed i could have made a poll such as this one. But anonymous online polls present a few differences to named polls, namely you get high personal conscience and low social conscience while classic polls get the other way around (low personal conscience and high social consicence). For further info, I advise you to read Social desirability, anonymity, and internet-based questionnaires, page 5, which say it much better than I (and that was, in fact, referenced in the essay).
The other reason ? Those interviews took 1h30 each. That's 12h of data gathering, and don't get me started on data organisation and classification (and time spent contacting everyone). But as I said above, even if it was simpler, I might not have done it on a bigger scale.

On using wikis :
The good thing with wikis ? Version control. You can always come back to a previous version of an article, and that's where the 'retrieved july 11th, 2011' comes in play : post-publication edits aren't a problem. As well, you can see who made modifications and when (not that it makes it more reliable, just more controled). Now that's out, your point of "unreliable sources" still stand, but if I may express my opinion, the two cases i used wikis where both for widely known and easily obtained information.
IF my information was to be wrong, then citing the wikis is even better. It allow people to correct them as well as providing a simple explaination to why my conclusions might be faulty. I stand by using wikis as a personal choice, if only on things "everybody know".

Oh, and for the sake of nitpicking : yeah, i didn't gave a specific edition of The republic of Plato. Because, you know, the traductor could have been non-objective >_>. (i'm surprised you didn't mentionned that one rarity ^^)

Luna

Just saw it on my most recent check of Equestria Daily!

Luna represent!

Fluttershy wrote:

Just saw it on my most recent check of Equestria Daily!

Luna represent!

Congrats Luna! It seems to have spawned a small shitstorm in the comments, ironically. Fortunately it is not over anything you said, the few people actually commenting on the essay are pretty positive about it.

I'll read it if I have time (AKA could be bothered) but I really, really dislike the whole "love and tolerence" thing. For some reason everytime I hear that it just really pisses me off. The first time I heard it I thought it was funny now it just annoys me. But whatever, that is just me.

I'll tell you what I think of it when I get around to it.