4 ms·

If I'm picking up one straw a day from my garden, and assume everyone in my city has a straw in their garden every day, I would be making a Hasty Generalisation

• benj111 7y ago
  I think its only as hasty as assuming that it's a straw accumulation zone. Considering that a lot of land in a city isnt your garden/house (shops, offices, parks), I would suggest that that would tend to balance out the risk of this being a SAZ. I take your point that this is a data point of one. But if I found one straw in my garden, it is astoundingly unlikely that is the only wild straw in my city. I wouldn't start putting a figure on it from that, but it does suggest the lower bound is much higher than one.
  • Cogito 7y ago
    I agree, trying to generalise anything based on 1 data point is going to be fraught with danger of hastiness. Having never found a straw in my garden my intuition is that (not finding straws in every garden) is more likely than (finding straws in every garden) but obviously I have no valid basis to put a number of any kind on that. Now while I think the original post is an example of Hasty Generalisation, I think the bigger issue is the generalisation combined with a sample bias. Self reported data points tend to be interesting because otherwise they wouldn't be reported. My thesis is that regularly finding a straw in your garden is interesting because it is unusual.