In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman addresses the concept of "invisible technologies." In his book, he talks about statistics and polling in the social sciences. He claims that, "...statistics creates an enormous amount of completely useless information..." (136), and that polling is problematic and not useful. In this regard, Neil Postman's argument is flawed. It is both stereotypical and unreliable. It is stereotypical, because he makes a lot of generalizations and deductions about social science. Postman's argument is also unreliable, because Postman uses sources out of context, and Postman himself is not well versed in the area of social science. This website will provide a critical analysis of Neil Postman's argument, presented in his book, that statistics are useless and polling techniques are problematic. Postman gives four problems with polling, and I address each one, as well as show that statistics are not useless.

This paper is an assignment for a class at the University of Texas at Austin taught by Tonya Browning entitled E309M: Computers and Writing. As a sociology / psychology major, I was offended by Postman's argument. I wrote this paper to critically analyze this argument. The paper is broken up into different parts, and you have the option to take your own path throughout it. Finally, I close my argument with a conclusion.

Robert Todd Carroll wrote an article that promotes a view of psychology in opposition to Postman's characterization of social scientists.