Thursday, May 6, 2021

Update on "The plural of anecdote is data"


Still no hits for the claim "seeing something or experiencing it is not proof enough to believe in it"

Here's the phrase in context

Everyone has heard the age-old dismissal of “I’ll believe it when I see it.” If you are or ever were a budding skeptic, this may have been your motto at one time. Unfortunately, seeing something or experiencing it is not proof enough to believe in it. Personal experience is known in scientific terms as “anecdotal evidence.” Personal experience can be very convincing. Unfortunately, human perception is subject to many errors and weaknesses

What he does is start with "seeing it", but then debunks "seeing it" with "human perception is subject to many errors and weaknesses", which is true, but does not mean seeing it can be dismissed. If somebody claims there is a spaceship in their backyard, and you go look, and there is something that might be a spaceship there, you damn well know something is there.  What it is, what actually is there is another matter.  But you don't discount what you are seeing by claiming seeing it is not proof that something is there.


"Seeing it" is the very basis of knowing many things, If a hundred people report seeing something, you don't discount that they saw something.  The plural of anecdote is data.

How the actual ocean tides behave, why they exist, what they are like

 An entire blog on this

It snows more when it is cold

 An entire blog on this

Covid 19

The horror of even trying to do a blog post on this is beyond my comprehension. 

The term "Evidence based science" has caught on

 When I started this blog there were no more than a dozen instances on Google search of the term.


Now there are thousands.


The evidence for this s hard to present, because "evidence-based science" was being used, which shows up differently than the verbatim search.