Sure, and right now that's not terribly convincing, because obviously at least one person aparently agrees with it, too. Of course, if 10 people came along and all of them disagreed with me, I might start to question the merit of my argument. If 100 came along and all of them disagreed, I'd have serious doubts. How many does it take before I should start assuming I've made a mistake and question the assumptions underlying the argument in my previous post?
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm well aware that my argument here is like asking when you stopped beating your wife. Also, as far as I know you don't know me, so I'll just tell you that I'm a mathematician by trade and have heard all the usual logical and statistical fallacies, and I am of course playing devil's advocate a bit in this discussion. That said, I do maintain that a lot of people place too much faith (no pun intended) in academic statistical methods without really thinking about what they represent and whether the underlying assumptions are valid. At the same time, those same people are often too willing to discard potentially useful evidence just because it doesn't fall into their neat mathematical/scientific method framework, by assigning it the label "anecdotal". In real life, things are rarely so black and white.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-09-10 08:36 pm (UTC)For the avoidance of doubt, I'm well aware that my argument here is like asking when you stopped beating your wife. Also, as far as I know you don't know me, so I'll just tell you that I'm a mathematician by trade and have heard all the usual logical and statistical fallacies, and I am of course playing devil's advocate a bit in this discussion. That said, I do maintain that a lot of people place too much faith (no pun intended) in academic statistical methods without really thinking about what they represent and whether the underlying assumptions are valid. At the same time, those same people are often too willing to discard potentially useful evidence just because it doesn't fall into their neat mathematical/scientific method framework, by assigning it the label "anecdotal". In real life, things are rarely so black and white.