BTW, I think your use of the asterisk goes beyond what was intended. Its typically been used to omit things or add caveats that only matter in very specific situations. 'in my personal experience' could mean you know 5 scientists or 5 thousand so mentioning a rough range would certainly give more credibility to your comment over the asterisk. That said, I broadly agree with the rest of your comment, but this did bug me enough to comment I suppose.

>I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.

I'm interested in knowing about them. Any major ones that come to mind?