"I'd love to have your discussion with you on this.
But before we go any further, I need either me or you to hand this off
to someone who can go through it in an hour, and either confirm it or destroy it.
Is that okay?"
Other ones: don't draw a conclusion that confirms to selected data.
If there's a criminal offense in this list, this is the one.
Because this can either be incompetence or deception.
Don't draw a conclusion that confirms to select the data;
a sound conclusion accounts for all the data.
In other words, outliers in the data are as real as the data you prefer.
And this is where, even scholarly publication, this should be exposed
in a peer reviewed process, But sometimes it won't be.
On a dissertation process or a thesis process.
When you submit your work to field experts, people who in theory
are supposed to have like, read everything.
If they know that you skipped something, oh, they're going to see that.
"You haven't accounted for this article, you haven't read that book, have you?
You haven't interacted with this or that. Why?"
And the good answer is; "I just didn't know about it. I'll go do that."
The bad answer is "I didn't like what he said."
You know, you have to account for this. Otherwise, you're cheating.
The way this works online or again in... there are some people out there
who, it seems, have all the time in the world.
And so they will make an argument, you know, "Jesus wasn't God", or
"Jesus did this or that", or "God is a moral monster" or something.
And they'll just throw everything at the kitchen sink.
I mean, just inundate you with verbiage, with citations, with sources.
And it's like, this is like 20,000 words.
How would I ever go through this?
So they're trying to win the argument just by the massive amount of material.
Usually, my first question, or what I will do, just by way of an example,
you look at this pile, and I'm looking for a couple things:
"Did you publish this only online?" "Why?"
"If it's so staggeringly good, would you mind if I send it to a field expert?
Better, why don't you do that? That would be your responsibility."
I often get things like this one, when I get into debates about
oh, racism is the big one here, you know,
trying to prove this or that race is superior or inferior,
or came from here, came from there.
It's like, "look, I'm not a geneticist, dude. I'm just not, but I know one.
And chances are he's gonna find a problem. Can I send it to him? Or her?"
And usually, if you get back an angry response, well,
the what that tells you is that they're afraid.
That gives you the answer as to why they didn't do that in the first place.
Because they suspect that there might be something wrong with the argument.
You know, it's good to have people who can find problems
with what you're working on. Okay, because that can be very helpful.
Everybody goes through that. I go through it.
Okay, everyone who's been through graduate school, this is the process,
this is what you do. It's just part of the game.
Don't take it personally. It's just the way it is.
They're trying typically to help you. Even their selfish motives:
"I can't let this go because if I let it go, and it gets published,
somebody's going to come back to me and say, 'How in the world did this person
get out of your graduate program?" I mean, there's some of that too.
They want to protect their own reputations, and so they'll hammer you.
That's okay. It's good. It's legit to be held accountable like that.
If you don't account for outliers in your argue, you're trying to evade accountability.
And when someone who's confronting you with information,
if the cite sources...
everything they cite is from somewhere else on the internet.
Nothing they use went through a peer reviewed process.
Okay, that just tells you they don't have the security really in what they're saying,
and you need to hold them accountable.
"I'd love to have a discussion with you on this, but before we go any further,
I need either me or you to hand this off to someone who can go through it
in an hour, and either confirm it or destroy it. Is that okay?"
And oftentimes that ends the discussion but you learn something there. Okay.