In Defense of Anecdotal Evidence

Igor Chudov @ home ichudov at algebra.com
Thu Dec 12 20:26:52 PST 1996


Huge Cajones Remailer wrote:
> Statistics are a useful tool, but they have their problems.  Their
> accuracy is often in doubt.  Most scientific data comes with an error
> analysis so you can tell what the figure means.  For some reason
> statisticians never do this so we cannot tell whether their numbers
> are accurate to within 0.1%, 1.0%, 10%, or even worse.
> 
> There are many other problems.  For instance, users of statistics
> assume they have a random sample, even in cases where that is far from
> clear.

Wrong statistics is usually obtained by idiots who do not know
what statistics is about. 

Social scientists and feminist studies are a frequent example of such
unfortunate situation.

	- Igor.






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