"MasterSeedy;c-2350459" wrote:
LOL'ing at people saying that one's person's observations are not "data" because if it comes from a single person it's an anecdote.
That's not how empiricism works, people. In a scientific journal what makes something an anecdote or a data point is methodology, not the number of principal investigators on the grant application. Same here.
Now you may not trust that someone on the internet you don't know is actually following the methodology that they say that they're following, but that's a different issue altogether.
In short: if you're saying that it's not data if only one person collects the observations, you're just wrong.
There is nothing wrong with using anecdotal evidence in the scientific method as long as it’s not the only evidence, the number of principle investigators as you call them is not the issue. One person collecting data points from a thousand different people is one thing, one person collecting a thousand data points from one source is an issue.
Nobody said one person collecting the data makes the data useless but one person presenting 8 or 10 data points in a pool of hundreds of thousands, collecting it in an uncontrolled environment with an unknown methodology and calling it conclusive evidence would not go over well in your grant application.
