[davebren]

Probably gonna get downvoted for this, but when you give an anecdote you don't have to preface it with "anecdata, n=1 sample size".

We know it's from your individual experience because it's a story about your individual experience. We've been doing this for all of human history. This is some kind of strange milieu of trying to always sound scientific, or it's fear of the "well akshually I'm gonna need to see a random placebo controlled trial", which is equally annoying.

[Fezzik]

It became necessary because, for years (decades), if you made a comment online that your personal experience informed you in such-and-such a way, the first comment would always be some moronic comment dismissing that personal experience because it is just one person’s experience. So, to avoid that idiocy, people started to preface their anecdotes by acknowledging that they know it is an anecdote. It sets the tone for the conversation.

[davebren]

Yeah but we can't let the insufferable dictate our way of speaking. In spoken language I hear it mainly by people that don't have a scientific background trying to sound more scientific.

[peyton]

I’ve been told explicitly to do what GP said, so it’s perhaps becoming word-of-mouth career advice at this point. In my case it told a different career story that is maybe more easily digestible.