Absolutely. I generalized from one datum once, and hoooo boy. I'll never do that again.
I'm being funny, but with a purpose: if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think it would be bred out of us by now. Sometimes you have to act on what you know, and different ages favor different personality types.
For instance, I believe that strong visual people have an advantage in our times. I suspect it's because visual people are able to explore (by quite literally visualizing) much larger solution spaces in shorter periods of time. Like the author I am skeptical of Galton's claim that people who cannot visualize are over-represented in math and science.
> if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think it would be bred out of us by now.
True enough, but you have to look at the context.
LW is sort of obsessed with Aumann's agreement theorem at the moment, which is why it frequently has long back-and-forth threads that don't go anywhere. This post can be seen as a reminder that sometimes you genuinely cannot convince someone of something, because it's all in your head.
> I am skeptical of Galton's claim that people who cannot visualize are over-represented in math and science.
I was about to say that it's impossible to do (algebraic) topology without visualizing... but then I'd be generalizing from one data point.
> if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think
> it would be bred out of us by now.
I think that we're set up to predict and act on N data points, and sometimes N happens to be one. The point of the article, to me, was that you have to understand this behavior in yourself and watch out for fallacies.
Just as if you know about confirmation bias, so you keep an eye out for contradictory evidence, if you know about the statistical problem of generalizing from one you can watch out for that, too.
I'm being funny, but with a purpose: if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think it would be bred out of us by now. Sometimes you have to act on what you know, and different ages favor different personality types.
For instance, I believe that strong visual people have an advantage in our times. I suspect it's because visual people are able to explore (by quite literally visualizing) much larger solution spaces in shorter periods of time. Like the author I am skeptical of Galton's claim that people who cannot visualize are over-represented in math and science.