Clarifying Representative Evidence
==Representative evidence lets you draw conclusions about the wider situation—not just the particular cases you happen to encounter.== Huff’s anecdote shows why that distinction matters. [:cite[1]{ln=95}][:cite[1]{...
==Representative evidence lets you draw conclusions about the wider situation—not just the particular cases you happen to encounter.== Huff’s anecdote shows why that distinction matters. [:cite[1]{ln=95}][:cite[1]{ln=96}] His father in law thought California had more crime because its newspaper carried so many crime stories. But Huff points out that newspaper coverage is a biased sample : how much space a paper gives crime is not the same thing as how much crime occurs. [:cite[1]{ln=95}][:cite[1]{ln=96}] The practical lessons are: Check how the evidence was selected. Does it reflect the situation you want to understand, or only what gets reported? [:cite[1]{ln=96}] Don’t confuse quantity with representativeness. By implication, reading more stories from the same biased source would not fix the underlying problem. [:cite[1]{ln=96}] Keep the conclusion within the evidence. The anecdote undermines the father in law’s reasoning; it does not, by itself, prove that California had less crime than Iowa. [:cite[1]{ln=95}][:cite[1]{ln=96}]