pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I know a man who has visited the sexual health clinic more than once, he had Chlamydia twice at least. He told me that on both occasions the girl he slept with to get it had a first name beginning with the letter M. “So stay away from girls whose first name begins with M” was the advice he offered. That seemed silly to me, how had he arrived there?

Simple logic, the kind that you build yourself. What is true is that there was a correlation but it did not indicate causation, not every woman with the letter M at the start of her name could have an STI? Also he hadn’t slept with all the women of the world, he had done no elimination of the possible counter data, what if there were two Js that he could have slept with, but didn’t, that also each had an STI in his past? Had he considered that? So his data set was incomplete, and he had not been diligent enough to do a wide enough study, i.e sleep with two ladies bearing each letter of the alphabet as the lead of their first name, but that would still only be 52 women, hardly enough in a nation of 60+ million people, half of which women, to count as a valid study. Also he had not slept with enough Ms, he hadn’t tested them all so the assertion that he was making was merely a speculation that all of them might carry an STI.

This is anecdote, a what has happened to me kind of logic and it doesn’t work when trying to make generalisations or specific rules. What happens is that you only have your own data, and nobody else’s, to go on, if you could find others that agreed with you then you might possibly be onto something, but our protagonist hadn’t, he was relying only on his limited experience. Even if he had found a few people that had agreed with him and had had the same experience that also would be challengeable, there would hardly be enough of them and they might all have slept with the same Ms. Even if they all had slept with different Ms the number of Ms would still be too low compared to the amount of Ms in existence and the amount of non-Ms that were of course not collectively slept with.

I think my friend was mistaken to be so hard on the Ms?

Paul Simon Wilson