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Re:Natural born programmers by bmalee on Friday October 11, 2013 @12:54PM (#6534316)
It's a meaningless observation. One anecdote is not statistically relevant.
Re:Natural born programmers by _delirium on Friday October 11, 2013 @01:13PM (#6534442)
Self-reports typically don't even count as one data point, because they're notoriously unreliable. Reports about one's childhood and motivations, doubly so. There's a reason psychology as a science is no longer based primarily on introspection, as it was in the 19th century.

Exceptions if people's self-conceptions are what is actually being studied; in that case collecting self-reports can be legitimate data-collection.