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But then these people look at history, and see this giant pile of anecdotes, and all the sudden it's the Middle Ages again and we can hermenutic our way to wisdom by staring at it really hard

My whole life is a pile of anecdotes! And yet I've used my experiences to build a functional mental model of the world. I can use history in the same way.

You argue that anecdotal data should be flatly ignored when making decisions. If that were true then newborn children would be the best reasoners on the planet. Your argument cannot hold in general.