Well, you mentioned that intermittent career change seems to produce interesting and effective people. If sticking to a single career produces exactly the same effects, then there doesn't seem to be much tying the effect to the choice of career; and if you simply haven't observed any people who have stuck to the same career, then your data are insufficient to suggest causality between intermittent career change and interestingness/effectiveness.
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What I mean is that people who I know to have chopped and changed have in high proportion had these various positive qualities, which while present in other people too don't seem to be so highly visible. But the set of chop-and-changers I know to be such is very small and "other people" is very large, so obviously any statistician would laugh me out of the room, assuming they hadn't realized I knew perfectly well I was making a subjective statement. Or possibly even then.
Pedantry aside, or that bit of pedantry aside, even with realistic sample sizes, more objective data collection (regarding these subjective qualities of people, *cough*) etc, there'd still be no evidence of causation (i.e. interesting and effective people inherently tending to change career would explain the results too).
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Date: 2004-08-24 08:12 am (UTC)This comment brought to you by Pedantic Point-Missing UK.
Pedantic Point-Missing UK
Date: 2004-08-24 11:08 am (UTC)I'm getting cam.misc flashbacks already.
What I mean is that people who I know to have chopped and changed have in high proportion had these various positive qualities, which while present in other people too don't seem to be so highly visible. But the set of chop-and-changers I know to be such is very small and "other people" is very large, so obviously any statistician would laugh me out of the room, assuming they hadn't realized I knew perfectly well I was making a subjective statement. Or possibly even then.
Pedantry aside, or that bit of pedantry aside, even with realistic sample sizes, more objective data collection (regarding these subjective qualities of people, *cough*) etc, there'd still be no evidence of causation (i.e. interesting and effective people inherently tending to change career would explain the results too).