12 ms·

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring i

• freedomben 5y ago
  Idahoan here, previously lived in Utah. Just adding to your point. Both Idaho and Utah are becoming inundated with people from California. It's mind boggling how hard it is to find housing here. When we bought our last house we were repeatedly outbid by cash offers from California buyers. In my current neighborhood there have been 7 families that moved in during the last 12 months. One (us) from Utah, one from Texas, and the other 5 were from California.
  • tjr225 5y ago
    40 million people live in California. That’s more than any other state by about 10 million. That’s also nearly almost a sixth of our entire country. Everyone everywhere in this country feels like it is getting inundated by Californians. Some more than others, sure. I can see two or three cars with Cali plates right now from my stoop. More people will always be from there. I suspect this has been happening for a long time and just now for some reason people are noticing.
    • antonvs 5y ago
      > That’s also nearly almost a sixth of our entire country. Not quite. It's nearly an eighth.
  • tolbish 5y ago
    Have you considered that this is a national problem? Californians are snatching up the affordable homes in Utah because others from around the country are snatching up the affordable homes in California.
    • freyr 5y ago
      because others from around the world are snatching up the affordable homes in California.
• teachrdan 5y ago
  Do you have data to back that up? Do we know that the number of Californians leaving is higher than before, and if so, by how much?
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I do not have any data to present. I only have my personal observations and anecdotes from my peers. Which is why something seems off when this article claims the exodus is a myth when I see so many California license plates and when my realtor friend says a lot of Californians are buying up houses in the local market. I don't claim to be a better researcher than the folks in the article but the conclusion doesn't seem to add up.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • not2b 5y ago
      There are people leaving California, and California's population is huge. But the rate at which they are leaving is less than that of many other states, and the main migration is within the state. You are seeing a lot of Californians because there are a lot of Californians. This isn't new: a couple of decades ago you saw a ton of people from California buying up property in the Portland area back when California's population was booming and Portland real estate was cheap.
  • alanbernstein 5y ago
    California is losing a house seat, while Texas and Colorado are gaining one (or two for Texas). While the census doesn't account for the difference between growth rate and migration, it seems pretty suggestive to me. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-data-release.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-d...
    • deaddodo 5y ago
      You know, you gain seats by gaining population. Just because one state is growing faster doesn't mean another is losing people. Those are hardly dependent nor even expected (California gained it's massive population despite an overall high growth rate of the rest of the nation).
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  what a dumb quote by bezos
  • lostinquebec 5y ago
    The election wins of Trump, Boris Johnson, Brexit and The Liberals in Australia show that data collection really matters. Similarly the financial crisis of 2009 shows that missing data can really matter. That's the key point of the quote: > There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it
    • geofft 5y ago
      But those are all examples of data collection working fine, though, and people not listening to the data because their anecdotes went the wrong way. FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28.6% chance of a Trump victory: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ This is a number far greater than zero - it is, for comparison, more likely than flipping two coins and them both coming up heads, or drawing a random card from a deck and having it be diamonds. Opinion polling of the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election showed Boris Johnson favored to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_Conservative_Party_leadership_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_C... Opinion polling on Brexit showed that it clearly could have gone either way, with a narrow margin between the two options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United... I'm less familiar with Australian politics, but assuming you mean the 2013 election, opinion polls showed the Liberals were clearly in the lead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2013_Australian_federal_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2013_A... If people look at data that says "28.6% chance of winning" and they choose to read it as "0% chance of winning," that's not a problem with the way anyone's measuring anything, that's a problem with people trying to treat data as if it's an anecdote.
      • sellyme 5y ago
        > I'm less familiar with Australian politics, but assuming you mean the 2013 election They definitely mean the 2019 election.
• hpoe 5y ago
  I'll throw in my 2 cents that I can confirm the anecdote. I just moved to a small town in Idaho because my wife was from there. We found our house because several new developments are going up. As I've been chatting with some people at church* I was told that about 1/3 of the people that attend have moved to our little town in Idaho from Southern California in the past 2 years or so. That might not seem like much, but considering that this is small town in the middle of Idaho it seemed like a pretty big deal to me. It's especially interesting to see many people who have more traditional jobs, often revolving around construction or the cultivation of potatoes interacting with many of the white collar, MBA type Cali expats. * Note: The church I attend is a world wide church and divides it's congregations based on geographic area, encouraging people to attend the service based on where they live. This point is made to forestall the correlation causation criticism, that would imply the church I attend is particularlye attractive to people that have recently moved in from SoCal, EDIT: Just to clarify my wife and I did not move from Cali, we moved from Utah, because it was getting filled up with people from Cali, that resulted in prices for housing going up considerably.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    Idaho is trendy with Californians, fwiw.
    • chrisco255 5y ago
      So is anywhere but California, apparently.
      • wolverine876 5y ago
        Apparently not. For example, of people leaving San Francisco: 72% moved elsewhere in the Bay area ~20% moved elsewhere in California The next most popular destination was Washington state, the majority going to Seattle. Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Only-one-U-S-city-saw-a-bigger-pandemic-exodus-16258720.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Only-one-U-S-city-...
• deaddodo 5y ago
  > It's abundantly clear there is a lot of migration out of California. Just ask Texans, Coloradans, and Idahoans. Or, you know, people generally migrate between states and Californians make up 13% of the population.
• calebm 5y ago
  Going out on a limb here, but sfgate.com might have some bias. It's easy for data to be measured incorrectly when there is an incentive to getting it wrong.
  • kylestlb 5y ago
    The study was done by various parts of the UC system, not sfgate. Results are compiled here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-studies-contrary-popular-belief-residents-are-not-fleeing-california https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-studies...
  • michaelmrose 5y ago
    Feel free to elaborate regarding what you think they did wrong or provide an alternative valid source of data.
• cmckn 5y ago
  That Bezos quote is pretty dodgy, but to address your point: Ask anyone in Denver and they'll tell you there's a mass exodus out of Chicago. Or ask anyone in Miami and they'll tell you there's a mass exodus out of Philly. People move around. I think this is a similar phenomenon to buying a car and "seeing that car everywhere all of a sudden." It's all about perspective. In this sense, data is always better than anecdotes.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    I am a big fan of that Bezos quote personally, as it is usually a flag that I can ignore anything written after it.
  • astrange 5y ago
    Crime anecdotes are famously totally wrong, people always say crime has gone up recently even though it's collapsed in most US cities even since 2000 or 2010. What this actually means is that people are watching too much TV.
    • TillE 5y ago
      It's genuinely terrifying to realize just how much power mass media holds over shaping public opinion. Without even lying usually, simply choosing what to report and who to give a platform. American media isn't even particularly bad in this respect, it looks generally fair and reasonable compared to eg, the British media.
      • permo-w 5y ago
        the British print media. Our TV News is pretty sane and sober, although there are current efforts to change that. See: GB News
        • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
          Yeah, I honestly feel like the BBC might have been the only thing preventing the UK going full-on culture war in the past ten or so years. (in general, the legal requirement for TV to be impartial and cover both sides is a much bigger contributory factor).
• wolverine876 5y ago
  A (baseless) line about anecdotes - and said by someone with no awareness of the issue at hand or the research - is evidence that this entire research project is wrong? Why do we even use research? Why don't we just run on anecdotes? There have long been anecdotes about witches and black cats, about prayers to the rain god, etc. I'm pretty sure Amazon relies on research and data.
• 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  The issue is the labeling. It adds subjectivity to what can be just as easily communicated objectively. "Research Shows Percentage of Californians Planning To Leave State Unchanged since 2019" Once SF Gate adds the subjective labels: Exodus and Myth, we get focused on the accuracy of the labels. The meanings of labels evolve, and that evolution is 'phased' through society. Hence labels will always mean different things to different people, different meanings lead to different reactions and then misunderstandings and in worst cases, conflict. I intentionally try to filter out labels for that reason.
• mbesto 5y ago
  > It's abundantly clear there is a lot of migration out of California. Just ask Texans, Coloradans, and Idahoans. Currently residing in Texas for 2.5 years now, moved from California. Yes, I anecdotally meet "a lot" of fellow NY/CA residents moving here. I also anecdotally have noticed that Whole Foods sells lots of local texan brewery beers. Are Texan local breweries on the rise in popularity or is it just that my proximity to the situation is making me thinking thats the case? (Note - I'm middle aged and work in tech, like lots of the people moving to Austin from CA/NY) The media's obsession with California, is IMHO, hilarious. I lived there for 3.5 years. The quality of life is incredible, but that is offset by the absurd cost (and thus the economics of your work situation). This experience has, IMO, been in decline. But this is exactly how market dynamics work in a union of states. The more people leave California the cheaper (and thus sustainable) it becomes. This is an overall good thing for Americans, regardless of where you live. Market liquidity means higher optionality.
  • thebradbain 5y ago
    This is very funny to read, because I had the exact opposite journey as you. I love California so much that I buckled the popular media narrative and moved _from_ Texas _to_ California. Funnily enough, people talk about the California-to-Texas pipeline as if it's a new thing, but it's been an observed phenomenon since at least 2005, and it's a lot smaller than the media would have you think (usually net ~40k year leave CA for TX, with about 80k going to Texas and 40k coming from Texas). That is 0.1% migration, and seemingly negligible in either direction. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2021/03/03/californians-moving-to-texas-covid-migration https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2021/03/03/californians-mo...
    • mbesto 5y ago
      Out of curiosity: what city in Texas to what city in California? I think that's another huge factor in all of this - both CA and TX have vastly varying degrees of cultures across its cities.
      • thebradbain 5y ago
• spoonjim 5y ago
  The thing is that Bezos has very good instincts. So he’s able to distinguish between anecdotes like “my packages are taking longer to get to me” and “Bill Gates has been tracking me through my covid vaccine.”
  • not2b 5y ago
    I suspect that Bezos made that remark in a very particular context and didn't mean it to be generally applicable.
    • antonvs 5y ago
      Besides, he didn't write this in a textbook. What he probably meant is something more like, if anecdotes seem to be pointing in a certain direction, it may be worth exploring the causes and understanding them, rather than just ignoring the anecdotes because they contradict some other information you have. What you don't know can hurt you. This is the kind of thing good CEOs and leaders do. There's some overlap with Andy Grove's observation that "only the paranoid survive."
• imtringued 5y ago
  I have collected a list of birth dates of mothers and most of them are not the same age as my mother. The data must be wrong and all mothers must be as old as my mother.
• tonymet 5y ago
  I agree. We’re encouraged to trust stats over personal observations, but stats have noise , error and bad narratives . Generally stats are picked and chosen to tell a story . Among my friends and coworkers I’ve known dozens who left CA in the past 12 months . Even just this morning as friend surprised me that he will be gone in a week, and I know many more who are actively looking to leave , particularly before fire season
  • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    Just remember, your friends/coworkers are not a random sample.
    • tonymet 5y ago
      Random samples also mean there's more noise in the data. When someone tells you a fact , like "average crime is low", or "very few people get struck by lightning", that average is skewed by useless noise. If there's high crime in your neighborhood, who cares about the low crime neighborhoods? If you work in a corn field all day, your risk of getting struck by lightning is quite high. That's the great myth with statistics. They are deliberately chosen to tell a story. By segmenting the data, you will get signal that matters to you. If my friends and coworkers are all leaving, that is more meaningful to me and the decisions I'll make over the next year than if the majority of the entire population is staying. It also has an impact economically on the State if specific segments of the work population are leaving.
• pchristensen 5y ago
  Californians moving to Texas seems new. But for the rest of the West, California had more people than Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Combined. A tiny % of Californians coming to town with coastal equity can upset the balance in these much smaller states. It’s a joke not joke that people sell their 60 year old bungalow in LA and buy a 20 acre horse ranch for cash in Boise.
• croes 5y ago
  So Bezos thinks anti vaxxers are right?