Comments on: The Misuse of Anecdote – a sceptical myth? http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/ CJ's weblog: the idle thoughts of an idle fellow Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:24:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Chris http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-136 Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:39:50 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-136 Yes makes perfect sense Ashwaria. No disagreement here. I’ll have to have a look at your link when I get back in!

]]> By: Ashwaria http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-109 Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:55:48 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-109 (1) Evidence in the form of an anecdote or hearsay is called anecdotal if there is doubt about its veracity: the evidence itself is considered untrustworthy or untrue.

(2) Evidence, which may itself be true and verifiable, used to deduce a conclusion which does not follow from it, usually by generalizing from an insufficient amount of evidence. For example “my grandfather smoked like a chimney and died healthy in a car crash at the age of 99″ does not disprove the proposition that “smoking markedly increases the probability of cancer and heart disease at a relatively early age”. In this case, the evidence may itself be true, but does not warrant the conclusion.

In both cases the conclusion is unreliable; it may not be untrue, but it doesn’t follow from the “evidence”.

Ancient Mexican Culture

]]> By: Chris http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-86 Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:30:51 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-86 Absolutely. I have all kinds of issues with how we know and what we know – epistemology is my thing, and I spend a huge amount of time on theories of knowledge, but we are evolutionarily disadvantaged form knowing truth, not prevented from doing so. :) Certainly while all our reasoning can be effected by unconscious cognitive biases, I think the quest for rationality is a very noble and important endeavour!

]]> By: Mo http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-85 Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:26:25 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-85 obviously the human brain is simply not designed to know truth

Even so, one might hope that we could have got into the cultural habit of teaching reason to our children, in the same way as we make the effort to teach them non-instinctive moralities that are believed to confer group advantage. But perhaps there’s actually something in the brain that actively rejects it…

]]> By: Chris http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-84 Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:43:38 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-84 Hi Mo,

not sure how i missed this before! Yeah this is the mistake of correlation for causality: the common sense adage “correlation is not causality” just reminds us that while things are found together they are not always caused by one another!

Actually I think this is hard wired in to our brains by evolution – think about it – I eat berries, I get sick. I poke tiger with stick, I get bitten. We make sense of things in “cause and effect scenarios”. Now it could be in both those cases that “correlation is not causality” – the bisonburger we had for lunch was responsible, the tiger just had toothache – but in fact in the majority of cases “correlation IS equal to causality”, and our brains have evolved a cognitive bias towards false positives because poking sleeping tigers and eating berries that made you or your sisters aunties friend sick are high risk strategies, liable to remove you from the gene pool.

So it’s part of our evolutionary heritage, and a generally useful one – especially in children, who learn this way. Unfortunately it’s not true. But then our brains evolved through adaptive advantage which is designed to aid reproduction and survival, not search out objective truth. So obviously the human brain is simply not designed to know truth! :)

cj x

]]> By: Mo http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-70 Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:07:19 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-70 There’s a third meaning of “anecdotal evidence”, the statistical one, which (at least in my world) is more commonly used than either of the above. There’s a common reasoning pattern “this happened to me, therefore it reflects a general principle X”. Said principle X would then be dismissed as based on anecdotal evidence, ie. a small number of cases which may not be a representative sample, may embody reporting bias, etc. Virgin Trains are always delayed — how do I know? — because I went on one once, and it was delayed. And the same thing happened to my brother.

]]> By: David http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-misuse-of-anecdote-a-sceptical-myth/#comment-65 Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:52:31 +0000 http://jerome23.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-65 Interesting piece, CJ.
The ghost sighting you refer to… was that your experience at Thetford Priory? I take it you believe this to be an experience of a ‘residual recording’ type haunting rather than an encounter with a spirit?

DCG

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