hasty generalization

You met three of them. There are eight billion people.

Wrong: “Both contractors we hired were unreliable, so contractors are unreliable.”

Right: “How did we pick those two?”

Two is not a sample. And how they were chosen may explain everything.

The problem is size and selection. A tiny sample is noisy, and a biased one is worse—it can be huge and still wrong, because how it was gathered decided the answer in advance.

How to answer it: ask how many, and how they were selected. If both answers are vague, the generalization is a vibe.

Now go ask how many.