My very good friends on the left used to love, when presented with a fact which challenged their assertions, to use the expression, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” I, of course, pointed out that an ‘anecdote,’ if confirmed, actually is a datum. A few years ago, Barry Ritholtz writing in The Big Picture, reported:
Which brings us back to anecdotes: As it turns out, the original quote about anecdotes had a very different context, and a much more nuanced meaning. It is attributed to Ray Wolfinger, who was a political scientist at the University of California-Berkeley.
Wolfinger’s original statement was quite literally the very opposite of what we all have been using. He had actually said “the plural of anecdote is data.” This should affect the way we think about and use data.
Mr Ritholtz noted the problem of selection bias. Yes, he used as an example, shark attacks are dangerous, and frequently lethal, but the vast majority of interactions between humans and sharks do not result in sharks attacking humans. I am reminded of General ‘Buck’ Turgidson’s statement in Dr Strangelove, “I don’t think it’s fair to condemn the whole program due to a single slip-up.” And that leads me to the obvious question: just how many of these data points does it take to destroy the narrative? Continue reading
