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Do Kids Still Program?
From his journal, hogghogg asks: "I keep finding myself in conversations with tertiary educators in the hard sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, etc.) who note that even the geeks—those who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciences—enter university never having programmed a computer. When I was in grade six, the Commodore PET came out, and I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to program it. Now, evidently, most high school computer classes are about Word (tm) and Excel (tm). Is this a bad thing? Should we care?" Do you think the desire to program computers has declined in the younger generations? If so, what reasons might you cite as the cause?
My post wasn't an ad hominem; I wasn't saying that your argument was wrong because you're uneducated, but rather that your argument's lack of merit may be a result of your lack of education.
Anyway.
"Anecdotal" here is being used as in the phrase "anecdotal evidence," which is, really, no evidence at all. In other words, no one is denying that Gates, Kamen, et al. did what they did as dropouts; the point you're missing is that a few counterexamples do not disprove a general principle. You can find successful dropouts just as you can find people who survived car crashes because they weren't wearing their seatbelts and were thrown clear of the car, who smoke three packs a day and live to see their great-grandchildren graduate from college, who grow up in poverty but pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become tycoons, who have unprotected sex with hundreds of partners but never catch a disease -- none of which changes the reality that wearing your seatbelt is a good idea, smoking is bad for you, most people who are born poor stay that way, and that careless promiscuity is a really good way to get AIDS.
To put it in more technical terms, any data set of a reasonable size will have outliers. The reason we have a special word for such data is because they're not representative of the way things usually are.
I do have to apologize for my cheap shot above. Lots of highly educated people don't understand this either.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Most of them don't even have coherent writing skills.
Ahem... *rolls eyes*