Anecdotal Evidence

[robvalue]

Sure, yes. I've never given you the run around, not intentionally. I try and have serious discussion. If you've interpreted what I've said that way, that would explain your behaviour towards most of my posts lately. It's why I've often given up taking to you. I apologize if it has seemed that way. I can't deny I'm sometimes sarcastic, when I'm dealing with a point that I consider to be blatant, for comedic purposes. This isn't meant to be anything serious. Like I said, I have zero emotional investment in this, absolutely none. I don't care. God could turn up right now, and besides scientific interest, he can run along again.

There is a big problem with what you've just said above. You're saying anecdotes become more likely to be true, as their content becomes further removed from reality; at least once you've passed the point of the extremely mundane. I find this to be entirely backwards. The more outlandish the anecdote, the more likely it is that the person is mistaken.

This leads to one of two other key points I forgot to mention.

(1) An anecdote only ever tells you what a person believes happened. It can never tell you what actually happened. They can be as truthful and accurate as they like, but it will always be their interpretation of events. And when those events become more and more fantastical, our ability to accurately relay them will reduce. It's not the slightest bit unusual that someone might think they've seen something that a sceptic would consider undemonstrated by science. It's not surprising, at all. It is always going to be exceedingly less likely that this time, this time in particular, they really did experience it, and managed to do so accurately, in spite of science not even knowing what the fuck could be happening. The tendency to say "they can't all be wrong, this one is believable" is going to correlate highly with pre held beliefs, in my opinion. How do you pick them apart? Even the most reliable, truthful person can be mistaken. It's not even about that. That's a common mistake. Lots of people "saw the same thing"? Again, there are plenty of simple explanations, which can't simply be discarded because you like the conclusion. Not if you're taking evidence seriously. Yes, they can all be wrong, and it's not even surprising if they are. Not all lying, but wrong. Also, be careful with "you can't prove it isn't"; the argument from ignorance. An irrelevant statement revealing presuppositions. I'm not "allowing" any anecdotal evidence with all these objections? Quite right, I'm not, when it comes to the extraordinary, whether it lines up with my beliefs or not. I'm simply relaying how things work (in my opinion).

(2) How do you handle discrepancies? Take for example your religion. You have what you consider to be adequate anecdotes to support your beliefs. Then you receive anecdotes of the same quantity and quality which disprove your beliefs. They both weigh roughly the same, after all has been taken into account. What do you do? At the very best, you're looking to put one set of accounts a nose in front of the other. What good is that? Anecdotes are useless because they don't clear this up, ever. You can burrow around all you like looking for "reliability" and so forth, but at the end of the day, people are fallible. Anecdotes are not testable. They need other supporting evidence, or they are basically useless, when dealing with the extraordinary. Mundane history is not the same as extraordinary history. If you would say I don't get to define what is extraordinary, you would be right. But if you consider the stuff that goes on in the bible for example as not extraordinary, then we're really never going to agree on anything. That's just the New Testament. Savvy people won't even bother with the Old Testament, which is so completely obviously a load of rubbish.

With history in general, if you have competing evidence of equal strength and nothing to test, all you can say is that the result is unclear. This doesn't support any position. However, testimony that includes outlandish explanations is itself suspect. You would normally, I hope, treat less favourably a report that includes angels and such. And if the competing conclusions for an event are something mundane against something extraordinary, it's only logical to favour the former. Most of the time, that's what it will be, everything else being equal. People are just not reliable enough to alter this. Why would you make an exception to this rule? When it lines up with your own beliefs. That is the trap waiting for everyone.