American Sales for Week Ending July 26, 2008

[famousringo]

ioi said:

drkohler said:

What is irritating is the bouncing around of the X360 number. When the European numbers came in, X360 lost around 30k sales in the total. 2 hours later, the NA data appear and with 80k sold, the number jumped 120k...

There really should not be that constant number fiddling to try and match shipping numbers/NPD numbers. Make a thread at the end of every quarter where you "reset the numbers" once and once only.

(It is clear that the PS3 was overtracked a little - in Europe, not in NA, and the x360 is overtracked - in NA, not in Europe where it is undertracked).

 

It is our policy to handle data in this way - that is how we ensure that whenever you visit the site the data is as up to date and accurate as possible. Why keep data up that we know is incorrect? Adjustments most often come from internal corrections and adjustments as well as comparisons with external data points. I'm not sure what is so irritating about it?

 

 

It's irritating because most people want to live in a black and white world of absolute truth. They want to look at a question, establish The Truth, and move on to the next question.

They hate the complexity of a world full of uncertain probabilities, where shades of grey force us to visit and revisit every question to see if we've gotten closer to truth than we were before. It's a lot more work, especially if you lay a lot of decisions on what you had previously thought to be true.

Most people don't actually understand what statistics are or what they mean. Rather than seeing these adjustments as constantly moving closer to truth, they think you're moving from one lie to another.