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Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee
Could it be Presidents you philosophically agree with are ranked lower than you'd want?
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No, it's that ranking people 1 to whatever is absurd, and subjective—which is what I said.
Again, exactly how much better is President #1 from President #2? 1.378658765% better? What does that mean, did he tie his shoes 1.378658765% faster?
The analogy to those shows on the history channel is spot-on.
So while I think you could possibly put Presidents into some zoological piles like "effective," "ineffective," etc, saying that one is better than another based on having one more vote by some historian is absurd.
I would say such a ranking was absurd regardless of who was on top, or what the % of philosophical backgrounds is. It's SILLY.
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I thought these kinds of surveys polled historians from all kinds of philosophical backgrounds.
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Really? Where is the methodology section of the poll? I checked out the Sienna Poll, and in none of their materials does it list each historian polled, along with his party affiliation. That's what it would take for you to demonstrate that the poll had no political bias, you'd need equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats polled. Since ~80% of university profs are registered Democrats (have seen numbers in that area in a few different polls before)—and the remaining 20% is not Republicans, it's split along with parties LEFT of the democrats—it would be hard to get a 50/50 split without some proof of party affiliation.
So what we have is a silly idea—ranking Presidents—executed in an almost certainly biased way.