Netflix has a lot of subscribers, but it doesn't have that many, and in particular, in your neighborhood, does it have that many who are 38 year old males who l

Netflix has a lot of subscribers, but it doesn't have that many, and in particular, in your neighborhood, does it have that many who are 38 year old males who like action movies and Michael Moore? It's a question partly of scale. It's big, but not that big that we can't get dangerous results with demographics & statistical analysis. It comes back to the contemporary problem of statistics: We, programmers included as evidenced by many discussions of the sort, have a hard time getting it. We are only at the cusp of understanding what statistics can do with large data sets. Now, we can either work with researchers and organizations to deal with the very real concerns, or we can simply refuse to believe that giraffes don't exist because we never saw an animal with such a long neck before. It's the basic problem of progress.