Quote:
Originally Posted by Qingdai
Yes, that's why I said triangulating. Do you read beyond the first sentence? You quoted the whole thing.
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Yes, I did. But it's not triangulating to take a non-value and combine it with several results. This would be like "triangulating" where we take one directional reading from one location, and then we move to another location and report that we sighted to our target and it totally existed, and trying to use that to come up with a location.
I can't tell what's going on here. You guys are in general rational people whose opinions I respect. But you're trying to use a result when it cannot possibly contain information without some kind of comparison.
Either you've all suddenly gone insane, or you're using an inferred context for comparison which hasn't been made explicit. I'm guessing the latter, since that is pretty much always in place when people evalute things as "many" or "few".
In which case, just identify the context, make it explicit, and BOOM, you have useful information. It's still qualitative and all, but it's gone from "dimensionless nunber" to "actual data we could use in triangulating to try to find out whether there is a trend".
I feel like I'm being told "we weighed this, and it weighs sixty. That's heavy!" And then told that it is silly to ask for units, or compare to the weights of other similar things, because there's no need for that kind of scientific rigor when all we need to know is that sixty is heavy.