Mon 26 Mar 2007

Phrases That Annoy Me

Part 1 of many, I'm sure. I should try to avoid the temptation of posting to this series too often.

"...I'm sure this will be useful for many people, so ..."

Please publish your data, showing how you selected the people you sampled and ensured they were truly representative. Save me some time by also giving the confidence intervals on the result, so that I don't have to compute it myself. If you can't do any of this — you mean you made up your assertion? — it's only an emotional argument, not a scientific one. Drawing conclusions is therefore much harder and less rigorous.

Seriously, this type of argument falls victim to both unjustified use of closed world assumptions — if the group you're appealing to can't prove something's true, it must be false for everybody they don't know about — and restricted sample space problems — extrapolating from your own experiences without knowing they are typical; which they often aren't. Making an appeal along the lines of "I think this would be easier" is one thing. Roping in hypothetical "other people" without justification weakens your argument, as you are stooping to making unsupportable, empty claims, leading others to wonder why you couldn't use real facts.

Topics: venting