Agreed, people relating to them is why they do it, no question. It's just that engineers and scientists are typically trained to know that anecdata is a very p

Agreed, people relating to them is why they do it, no question. It's just that engineers and scientists are typically trained to know that anecdata is a very poor way to reason about the world, it consistently leads you into the wrong conclusion, making you feel like you have support for a fact when you actually don't. If the good journalist has hard underlying data, I would not at all begrudge them the anecdotes, and yet I'd still like to see their data thank you very much.