Depth 1 · 32 s
Two rainy days
Daniel's first two days in a new town are rainy, so "it always rains here". Too few examples, or examples all of one kind, make a hasty generalisation.
About this video
Daniel moves to a new town. It rains on his first day and again on his second, and he writes to his grandmother: "It always rains here." He is using induction, going from examples to a general conclusion, but he has two days out of a whole year. This short animation draws the year as 365 squares with only two filled in. Jumping from too few examples to a claim about all of them is called a hasty generalisation: "hasty" means done too quickly, and a generalisation is a claim about all of a group or about what always happens.
There is a second way to get it wrong, even with plenty of examples. Mina wants to know the most popular sport in her school, so she asks 40 people, all of them at the football club after training. Every one says football. Forty is quite a lot, but they are all the same kind of person, and the swimmers, runners and people who don't like sport were never asked.
To avoid a hasty generalisation, ask three questions: how many examples do I have, how varied are they, and am I saying more than they show? "It rained both days I've been here" is true. "It always rains here" says much more. Hasty generalisations are also how unfair ideas about whole groups of people begin. This video goes with the Too Few Examples lesson of Logic Level 1 on Knaph.
This video shows depth 1 of Hasty generalisation.
Learn Hasty generalisationTranscript
- 0:00Two rainy days in a new town. It always rains here?
- 0:04Two days out of three hundred and sixty-five. Far too few.
- 0:11Forty answers, but all from the football club. Everyone else was never asked.
- 0:17So ask. How many examples? How varied? Am I saying more than they show?
- 0:25The honest conclusion is often a smaller one.