I can grasp your meaning.
That's debatable.
I am asking you to support it. Can you?
I already did. The quote I pulled from your source.
I can see that I vastly over-estimated your debating skills here. My apologies. I will try to walk you through this.
Cherry picking:
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias. Cherry picking may be committed intentionally or unintentionally. This fallacy is a major problem in public debate.
Good. Now, there's another term for what happens when you select some data and ignore others in a manner which changes the results from the truth. It's called sampling error. We'll come back to that in a moment.
When you are pointing to an individual data point (such as Clinton's claim that Comey said she was truthful) as evidence that Clinton is a liar
Hold up. First, let's acknowledge some things you have tried to brush under the rug. Hillary claimed that Comey said she was "truthful". I'm using quotes here because this was the actual word she used. But the
meaning is that Comey exonerated her (notice no quotes) regarding the charge that she lied to the public, since if she had been truthful then obviously she didn't lie. But Comey never said she was truthful, or true, or even debatable, he said her statements were false. So he didn't exonerate her.
And that is what I said.
So this SINGLE FACT does, in fact, prove one of my claims. And it's not cherry picking, because I made a claim about this single fact, and a single fact is enough to prove my claim about that single fact.
while ignoring evidence that the scope and frequency of her lies are mundane for a politician, you are cherry picking.
Now here is where it gets interesting. Let's go back to the definition of cherry picking. What's wrong with cherry picking? The problem is not that we aren't considering all the data. That is frequently impossible to do. Public opinion polls, for example, cannot obtain the opinion of everyone. They have to ignore the data from most people, because they can't get it. They pick just a few people to ask opinions of. But we don't consider that cherry picking. Why?
Because if the polling is done well, then the sample should be representative of the entire population. The fact that it's not the entire population introduces statistical error, but that can in principle be calculated, if the polling is done well. Sampling error can be minimized if care is taken in how the sample is constructed. But the sampling method must be
deliberately constructed so as to do this. If cherry pick your samples, then it won't be representative, and your results won't be accurate. Cherry picking is a sampling error.
Now, you presented a link which referred to two sources, and a supposed analysis of the data from those sources. These sources evaluated statements from Clinton, and decided whether they were the truth or lies. Assuming for the sake of argument that their analysis of those statements is completely correct (you don't actually know that it is), we still have a sampling problem. Are the statements they evaluated a representative sample of all of Clinton's relevant statements?
The answer is, nobody knows, but if they are, it's purely by coincidence. Why? Because there are no controls on the sampling method. In fact, neither source even
claims to control their sampling method, and without a controlled sampling method, there is no reason to believe that the samples are representative. No percentage derived from the work of Politifact or the Washington Post has any significance. The statistics are irrelevant for the same reason that cherry picking is a fallacy: if the sample isn't representative, the data isn't accurate. Politifact and Washington Post haven't established a representative sample of statements, they've just examined whichever statements struck their fancy. They have, in fact, cherry picked.
Which makes the whole thing ironic. You accuse me of cherry picking (it's not: I only used that quote to demonstrate ONE lie by Clinton, and one sample suffices to demonstrate that one lie), but the entire premise of the article is based on cherry picking.
When you quote-mine a single sentence that was contrasting "Clinton's fibs vs Trumps huge lies", you give the impression that Clinton's lies are terrible
What I actually said was correct, but you can't contradict it, so you have to talk about something other than what I actually said. But that's your problem, not mine. I have no obligation to defend whatever constructs you create inside your own head.
To sum up: what is wrong with Cherry-Picking is that you have taken an out of context quote to misrepresent what the article states.
Nope. I didn't pick it to represent all of what the article said. I picked it because it supports what I actually claimed. And that's not cherry picking, because (again) I'm not comparing Hillary and Trump. You're the one doing that, and you're doing it in a desperate attempt at a tu quoque.
