I wasn't holding up Paul Graham's essays as a paragon of essay virtue, just as a readily available example that people in the community will be familiar with. T

I wasn't holding up Paul Graham's essays as a paragon of essay virtue, just as a readily available example that people in the community will be familiar with. The difference between Paul Graham writing from personal experience, and the Salon author writing down some personal experiences, is real. Conflating the two ignores the distinction between expertise and mere rhetoric. I never stated that there is some minimum level of evidential firmness below which evidence can't be considered, but I am absolutely establishing a continuum in which statistical evidence, properly interpreted, is higher than random collections of stories drawn from the author's life by convenience to prove his conclusion once the bottom line has already been decided. I'm not a "hard discipline fetishist" if such a thing even exists, but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world. There are many areas wherein I agree that statistics is not currently applicable, and I implicitly acknowledged them in my post, although perhaps without sufficient emphasis. As for postmodernism, ye shall know them by their fruits. The hard sciences have borne iPhones, cancer treatments, space flight, psychiatric treatment, and cetera.