4 ms·
Missing the forest for the trees? Cherry-picking?
by briga 8y ago
Missing the forest for the trees? Cherry-picking?
- beat 8y agoNo, there's something else to it. It's often used as a misdirection technique, a way to change the subject from an uncomfortable discussion of something the commenter would like to avoid to a raucous debate about irrelevant details. (Not saying that's what's happening here, but.) Another form of the pattern is to just show off how smart the commenter is, disrupting the discussion in the process by getting caught up in details. I should go dig into the Greek Sophists. They probably had a word for it. They definitely taught it as a technique.
- EGreg 8y agoWOW. How about misleading people with cherrypicked examples? That is what is done in Multiple Testing and reporting “sensational” findings. Here are two links: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-most-expensive-neighborhoods-in-the-us-2012-11-06 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-most-expensive-neighbor... https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ Relevant topics: Simpson’s paradox Multiple testing Confirmation bias Tons of people on HN live in the bay area so they can’t imagine things being even more expensive elsewhere in the country. Thus a critique of the methodology behind the loaded headline is dismissed, even voted down.
- beat 8y agoWelcome to HN. Violate the GroupThink, get downvoted into oblivion. It's happened to me twice in two days (and for one of them, I knew when I posted that it would happen). But back to my point... the true generalization is that the Bay area, broadly, is the most expensive place in the US to live. Worse than New York. If you narrow down, you can find individual blocks of New York that are more expensive, but across the entire metro? Sure, the headline/argument is a little sensationalist. But reducto absurdum in the other direction is no better.