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Sports Commentary

|< < Prev #3262 (June 22, 2026)

Title text: The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.

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Explanation

P-hacking is the academically problematic practice of attempting to come up with a question for which the data offers a significant p-value (probability value), a subject previously covered in comic form. This is in contrast to correct scientific analysis, in which a realistic question is formulated clearly and then answered (or shown to be unjustified) with data.

A common way of doing p-hacking is analyzing subgroups to attempt to find significance when the full dataset does not yield statistically significant results; for instance, arbitrarily restricting the analysis of medical data to male subjects to derive a significant p-value when the inclusion of female subjects would have changed the conclusion. There are actual biological reasons why treatments may work differently between the different groups, and other reasons why female subjects may be less suitable participants in the trial, but a post facto decision to only present the 'male data' would be problematic. Similarly, looking at many other retrospective distinctions and then choosing to present only the possibly-random patterns that stood out, and ignoring all those that did not, would be questionable.

Sports commentators are known to do a form of p-hacking in which they recall facts regarding past performance, and sometimes they are made to sound more significant by choosing only such 'facts' that coincide heavily with the situation developing in front of them. By using overly narrow superlatives, a severe form of narrowing down of applicability (which was previously covered), it also realistically reduces any real confidence that such a dwindling number of precedents are a useful predictor of how the upcoming event will turn out.

Randall satirizes this with an example in which the restriction uses very specific criteria largely irrelevant to gameplay patterns in order to narrow down the subgroup sample size to a measly two games. The 0-2 record (there were two situations considered as comparable, and neither of them resulted in the result hoped for in this current case) reflects random noise much more than any significant insight. As well as being irrelevant to gameplay, their p-hacking also makes the game sound like jargon, which can be confusing and difficult to understand. This is ironic given a sports commentator's job is supposed to be to explain the situation they are fronting, rather than making them more vague and incomprehensible. However, this may be the inevitable response to being left in front of the camera during breaks in play, or even during periods of gameplay that are nominally unremarkable — feeling the pressure to say something, they will draw upon ever more obscure and irrelevant details to justify their (or their off-screen advisors') efforts and expertise to entertain and inform the viewing public.

The title text references the saying, "The plural of anecdote is not data", which means that if you have a collection of several anecdotes, that is not considered valid statistical data. (Anecdotes are usually based on highly-informal observations, under conditions without controlled variables. There's generally considerable selection bias; after all, stories are much more usually told about remarkable events rather than ordinary ones. And anecdotes are usually based on someone's memory rather than on properly-recorded observations, so the descriptions are often unreliable.) It then inverts this phrase, saying that if you perform p-hacking as shown in the comic to shrink your data set, all you are left with is an anecdote, statistically worth nothing.

This comic was published 11 days into the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The World Cup was also the subject of 3260: Messi, published the previous Wednesday. Sports commentary was also the subject of 904: Sports.

Transcript

[Cueball and Ponytail are sitting at a table, looking at the wall behind them. On the wall is a screen showing a soccer field with some mostly unreadable score information above it. The only readable information is that the score is 2-1.]

Cueball: They could be in trouble. Over the last 36 years, they've gone 0 for 2 when they've scored in the 37th minute to lead 2-1 against a team whose country comes before theirs alphabetically.

[Caption below comic:]

I wish sports commentators hadn't discovered p-hacking.

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