Originally Posted by
s0ssos
Hmm, never encountered that in statistics class.
I did, both in my doctoral statistics course and in law school.
To show how farcical your example is, imagine you go to a place and you meet x number of people, which compromises y percent of the population, and 98% of the people you meet are men. You conclude that most of the population is men.
And thus you conclude India has 98% men in their population.
It is absolutely wrong.
Yes, it is, which is why it is completely inapt.
Firstly, you didn't mean statistical. You mean anecdotal.
No, that's not anecdotal. The OP's original post is anecdotal.
Secondly, statistics is about trying to account for different variables that you don't know about, usually trying to balance them out so they neutralize each other, to get a sense of what is really going on.
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Statistics is about trying to identify specific variables that have a correlation with specific outcomes. Read some of the reported cases in which statistics were used to prove discrimination.