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by D_Alex 5116 days ago
I totally get where the author is coming from, but I am not reeeally sure if that is good advice. Anecdotal evidence has its place, eg: proof by counterexample, challenging false, but widely held beliefs, or alerting people to new circumstances.

A: "Murrumbidgee River is fun and safe for children to swim in! No one came to any harm there for the last 100 years!" B: "Dunno... my dog was eaten by a crocodile there last Saturday..."

B's dog is a sample of one, but maybe worth paying attention to.
2 comments
jessedhillon 5116 days ago
In your example, A is not relating a statistical or experimental finding, but instead dispensing commonsense knowledge which happens to be objectively false. It's not what the OP is talking about.
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JoeAltmaier 5115 days ago
Commonsense, like ulcers are caused by diet and anxiety, or that salt raises blood pressure?

I think a good point is made: statistical evidence is also misleading - it deliberately ignores (averages out) the extreme cases. The results are a distribution; statistics folds that into one number. Anecdotes fill out the distribution.

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carbocation 5115 days ago
Ulcers are not generally caused by diet and anxiety, but rather by bacterial infection. Anecdote is a much more compelling refutation of "common sense" than it is of empirical statistical evidence.

Statistical evidence is not misleading; it's simply the case that if you are seeking outliers, as in your example, then looking at measures of central tendency won't contain what you're looking for. Anecdote has no role in "fill[ing] out the distribution."

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TeMPOraL 5115 days ago
You don't challenge "false, but widely held beliefs" with anecdotes - those beliefs actually is exactly what anecdote becomes when it starts being repeated.

Alerting people to new circumstances is a good use, but that's pretty much all. Proof by counterexample works well only in mathematical logic, which is not how the real world works[1]. In reality you enter the domain of probability theory, and there counterexamples work exactly as the article author says - as an evidence that needs to be properly weighted. And these are those weights that people vastly overestimate in case of anegdotes.

[1] - by this I mean, mathematical logic is not how we model, comprehend and operate reality.

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