4 ms·

I don't want to be "that guy", but anecdote is among the least trusted forms of evidence.

• jschwartzi 10y ago
  Anecdote is also often the first sign that a phenomenon exists. It shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but if all the evidence you have is anecdotal, that's your cue to gather something more robust.
  • lomnakkus 10y ago
    Sometimes, yes. I'm not going to try to play any kind of numbers game here, but I personally think more of the "first signs" have (historically) come from experiments where the experimenter goes "Hm, that's weird." Not some sort of thing where a random stranger comes in off the street and says "Now, here's something weird that happened to me...".
• kordless 10y ago
  Actually anecdote is exactly what is most trustworthy in the context of another's mind. The primary reason is, in order to disprove my hypothesis that meditation is good for me, you must be me. Given you can't be me, disproving my assertion requires disproving what I'm saying about my own thoughts and feelings. While we, as humans, are exceptionally good at speaking for others, it's a horrifically inefficient process to render someone else's feelings. Chances are, you'll be wrong about how I feel, given you aren't me and simply don't have enough time left in this world to accomplish being me. And trust me, you don't want to be me. Note that my "reality" here is lack of circumstantial evidence for the harmful effects of meditation, which would just help identify there was a problem to begin with. In theory, this could be put to the scientific method to prove or disprove, given you could measure someone's mental state using something other than "he seems unstable today", which you can't, without speaking for someone else.