A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 11: The Methodology Memo
Among Pryor's files, Jonah found a memo circulated to the department six months earlier, responding to an early draft of Halvorsen's fieldwork findings: Dr Halvorsen's qualitative impressions are, I'm sure, deeply felt. They are not, however, data in any sense this model can use. I would gently suggest a more rigorous methodological grounding before her findings are permitted to influence Candour's design.
"He didn't engage with what she found," said Jonah. "He just decided it didn't count as evidence, because of what kind of evidence it was. And because it was her."
Pryor dismissed Halvorsen's fieldwork as insufficiently "rigorous" without engaging its content - an ad hominem rejection of qualitative evidence that Merton's principle of universalism would call exactly the kind of bias science is supposed to rule out.