Another Edge egghead contribution on Which idea should be retired from Science:
Nicholas G. Carr
Author, The Shallows and The Big Switch
[Anti-]Anti-anecdotalism
We live anecdotally, proceeding from birth to death through a series of incidents, but scientists can be quick to dismiss the value of anecdotes. "Anecdotal" has become something of a curse word, at least when applied to research and other explorations of the real. A personal story, in this view, is a distraction or a distortion, something that gets in the way of a broader, statistically rigorous analysis of a large set of observations or a big pile of data. But as this year's Edge question makes clear, the line between the objective and the subjective falls short of the Euclidean ideal. It's negotiable. The empirical, if it's to provide anything like a full picture, needs to make room for both the statistical and the anecdotal.
The danger in scorning the anecdotal is that science gets too far removed from the actual experience of life, that it loses sight of the fact that mathematical averages and other such measures are always abstractions. Some prominent physicists have recently questioned the need for philosophy, implying that it has been rendered obsolete by scientific inquiry. I wonder if that opinion isn't a symptom of anti-anecdotalism. Philosophers, poets, artists: their raw material includes the anecdote, and they remain, even more so than scientists, our best guides to what it means to exist.
I employ lots of anecdotes, data, academic studies, stereotypes, appeal to authorities, consensus, lone geniuses, fiction, the whole gamut of potential evidence.
In general, I think people aren't terribly good at distinguishing between the two main reasons why a bit of anecdotal evidence would be memorable to more than one person: either it's illustrative of a dog-bites-man pattern or it's a man-bites-dog story that is interesting for its rarity, an exception that proves the rule (i.e., supports the general pattern by being famously exceptional).
It's not terribly hard to notice which one it is, but you've got to look. But I don't see much in our culture that tells people to try to distinguish along this dimension. Does it even have a name?
Looking is lookist.
ReplyDeleteThe "proves" there is like a metallurgical or "proved in battle" sense meaning the exception may either strain against or break the rule, but not in such an empirically conclusive manner for the rule to be neglected or even requalified at present.
ReplyDeleteWe must not be too hasty in mocking Aristotle's prejudices. We have enough of our own, as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. [bonus Galileo verbiage added for Super Sunday edition]
ReplyDelete"In general, I think people aren't terribly good at distinguishing between the two main reasons why a bit of anecdotal evidence would be memorable to more than one person: either it's illustrative of a dog-bites-man pattern or it's a man-bites-dog story that is interesting for its rarity, an exception that proves the rule (i.e., supports the general pattern by being famously exceptional)."
ReplyDeleteWhat in God's name does that have to do with this particular article?
I'm just gonna go ahead and admit that despite my supposed 130 IQ, I don't understand which is the silliness here, anti- or anti-anti. But I just read Steve's excellent 1996 piece in ND, to which he recently linked, and I'd like to know how he got the idea that blacks lost interest in playing pro baseball because the straight lines of the baseballs don't leave enough room for jazzy improvisation. The real reason, as Gary Sheffield Will tell you, is that in baseball you have to take instruction from white guys in order to make the bigs, which isn't true to nearly the same extent in football and basketball.
ReplyDeleteSailer, taking inspiration from Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog/fox dichotomy you could maybe work up something with groundhogs.
ReplyDelete"In general, I think people aren't terribly good at distinguishing between the two main reasons why a bit of anecdotal evidence would be memorable to more than one person: either it's illustrative of a dog-bites-man pattern or it's a man-bites-dog story that is interesting for its rarity, an exception that proves the rule (i.e., supports the general pattern by being famously exceptional)."
ReplyDelete"What in God's name does that have to do with this particular article?"
I was confused by it too!
Looks interesting, but I don't understand either.
ReplyDeleteMickey Kaus wrote in 2007, "Why do I pay attention to anecdotal evidence? Because academics are always the last to find out what’s happening. If you wait until a social trend turns up in some professor’s peer-reviewed charts, you are waiting too long."
ReplyDeleteA professor once said to me that while an anecdote may indict, it cannot convict.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome.
"But I don't see much in our culture that tells people to try to distinguish along this dimension. "
ReplyDeleteProblem is if people start noticing patterns in society they might notice something frowned upon by their elite masters.
As the anecdote goes, data is the plural of anecdote.
Karl Popper said something like scientific advancement doesn't start with induction or deduction, it starts with a great idea.
Which might be a synthesis of both modes, informed by observation and rationalized by logical thought.
1. anecdotes are more memorable than data because you can take advantage of the power of episodic memory. mnemonic techniques such as loci and basic 'link' have been around for two thousand years because they work.
ReplyDelete2. anecdotes are better for generating hypotheses because visualizing a scenario allows you to search it for properties/dimensions that may have explanatory value but that wouldnt have come to mind if you just looked at a graph, table, or series of equations (pure abstractions).
3. conversations are much, much better when they're built around stories, so it's good to have a collection of them. swapping disconnected observations and summaries is just not fun.