Ben Finney wrote: > I responded to a post that seemed to claim that anecdotes about events > can be treated as data about events. They can't; that's what I'm > arguing.
And conveniently ignoring the key part of my post. Here it is again for those who missed it: "Before the days of cheap video, lots of scientific data was gathered by lone observers recording unrepeatable events. You build statistics by accumulating a vast number of such observations over time." Sounds like anecdotes can become data to me. It's a stupid argument anyway. Anecdotes *are* data. Some data is repeatable, some is not. All data has an associated confidence level. Single anecdotes are relatively low, as you gather more the confidence level rises (for the aggregate). Eventually you reach the maximal level by definition: the sum of all anecdotes is the universe of available data. No one's saying anecdotes are 100% reliable. But they aren't 0% reliable either. -- Edward Elliott UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) complangpython at eddeye dot net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
