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A comment on Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence. Parent comment

Re:Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Wash... by coldtea on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:56PM (#7583246)
Actually it is. An anecdote is an observation. And data is just a larger set of observations.

There's no requirement that data must be exhaustive. And in most social science research, it never is (actually that is frequently the case in hard sciences, too).

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Re:Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Wash... by dTal on Monday April 14, 2014 @12:37PM (#7587153)
The issue is that anecdotes come with a whopping big side of selection bias. Sure, it's technically "information", but calling it "data" implies rigor. There are a lot of alien abduction anecdotes, but this tells you more about humans than it does about aliens.
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