The uselessness of experience

Prompted by Rick, I think I should explain the point of my post against women. It’s to show that personal experience is useless as a guide to what’s true of large samples.Put it this way, my knowledge of women, although not the equal of Hank Moody’s for quantity or quality, is greater than most people’s knowledge of schools, hospitals, immigrants or welfare claimants. If - ex hypothesi - I’m wrong about women, having known hundreds of them, how can people claim to know about so much about (say) schools on the basis of experiencing just a handful of them? And yet everyone thinks they’re an expert on education. Or the NHS. Or immigration. Now, the optimistic view is that this doesn’t matter, because individuals‘ biases cancel out. For every Chris Dillow, there‘s a Julie Bindel, for every Nadine Dorries a Polly Toynbee - gawd... [read full story]