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Yeah, you know what ol' saw applies here? The plural of anecdote is not data. Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and indiv
by Frondo 10y ago
Yeah, you know what ol' saw applies here?
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and individually they probably don't do as well as a given woman. But that's not the point.
None of these broad trends mean anything when you look at an individual. The individual is a molecule in a gas.
(And I can't quite figure out why someone would read a piece on trends and immediately go to "but what about MEEE?" ... the whole thing is based on large-scale data, not the individual, so what about you? Nothing about you. This isn't about you.)
- danso 10y agoSorry for this nerd-interruption: The plural of anecdote is data, at least as said by that aphorism's inventor, Raymond Wolfinger: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data-after-all.html http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an... https://web.archive.org/web/20080523225000/http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0407a&L=ads-l&P=8874 https://web.archive.org/web/20080523225000/http://listserv.l... Both variations are insightful; I like using Wolfinger's because it is an accurate observation that all data start out as anecdotes, and are influenced/distorted by the collection and filtering process. Still, this also implies that one outlying anecdote is not enough evidence alone to dismiss the aggregate findings across all of the other anecdotes.