Forums.NitroExpress.com

Boy Will, you could not have said it any better. This is a little off topic, but you just touched on one of my pet peeves. Not a one of us could ever do enough of XYZ to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions. In fact, if a person does something only a limited number of times, that can actually influence his thinking more toward being wrong than being right. That is why I can't stand it when I see people debating an issue, and one person asks, "..well, have you ever done such and such?" That's not logical and it's not relevant - even if he has done it, NEITHER ONE of them has done it "enough" to be able to draw any logical conclusions. In order to draw a logical conclusion, you GOTTA study A LOT of cases from a large enough pool of samples. That means you gotta study a lot of cases besides your own. No one individual's experiences are any more conclusive that anyone else's. You have to look at something that is big enough to be representative of the whole picture. As an example, I used to always say that just because Billy drives to work one morning and hits all green lights, does not mean that every light in town is green - but I like your example better, with Bubba and his geewiz bullet! That one experience could not only fail to lead Bubba in the right direction, but actually steer him in the wrong direction. Limited experience can actually be worse than no experience. At least the person with no experience has not been biased the wrong way because of a couple of flukey incidents. The guy with no experience is a lot more likely to at least start out impartial than the person with limited experience. This is not to say that the person with limited experience is necessarily wrong all the time - It just means his own limted experience is not relevant because it cannot be considered as "proof" of ANYTHING.

Any time I am debating a topic, you will NEVER see me make the HUGE mistake of assuming that I know more about the issue than the other person just because I have more "personal" experience on the matter. Like you said, my own limited experiences "don't mean JACK!" There have been too many times in my life when I thought I knew something about something just because I had done it a few times, and then was humiliated later to learn the hard way that I didn't know crap about it. I will never again ask someone how many times they have done XYZ, as evidence that I am right and they are wrong.

I like the way you put that so much, I should adopt that as my new signature line. Good job, Will!

OK, I'll get off my podium now.

Ingwe

--------------------

_________________________________________________

Learn from other people's mistakes - you can't live long enough to make them all yourself.

Post Extras