A weird thing about anecdotes: there are so many humans, and each human has so many things happen to them, that for a great many simple stories, you might make up (as long as it is within the bounds of physics/current technology/human capacity, and isn’t too specific), something similar has happened to somebody.
For instance, I just made up these stories that I’ve never heard of ever happening:
• a young child stealing their mother’s car
• a dog discovering buried treasure
And indeed, with a quick search I can confirm that these things seem to really have happened!
Though, of course, this won’t always be the case since the number of human events still pales in comparison to the number of concepts that can be mixed – for instance, I couldn’t find even one documented case of “a clown being killed by bees” (though I’m confident that at some point in history, someone was dressed in a clown suit when a bee stung them).
In any event, the preponderance of events on our planet means that something happening one single time tells us almost nothing. Having happened once is a very low bar.
And yet, to make a point in a way that people find compelling, it’s sometimes mandatory (or close to it) to give real-world examples that demonstrate the point.
This creates an awkward tension where a single real-world example often has almost no evidentiary value but has substantial persuasive power.
There are some special cases where an anecdote can provide meaningful evidence. For instance, when the anecdote is so well documented or reliable that you know it happened AND the outcome couldn’t reasonably have been caused by anything other than through the explanation the anecdote provides – such as a case study in a hospital where some experimental new treatment saves a patient with a previously incurable disease. Or when you yourself have tried something once (e.g., a self-help technique), and it seemed to work well, and that is sufficient justification for trying it again.
But in most cases, despite their usefulness in making a compelling point, anecdotes should be thought of as a way to imagine something more vividly and see more clearly specific ways it can manifest, not as evidence for something being true. They are important when explaining a concept, but usually not because they provide evidence of its validity.
This piece was first written on September 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 11, 2024.
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