I am so happy to see someone make an effort to do more than tell a story of how their girlfriends cousins dog said something and so obviously facebook/college/everything is totally over. Anecdotes are for color, data is for predictions and analysis.
People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal, but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.
It's really annoying when people confuse humility and an acknowledgement of a scarcity of evidence with jumping head-first into making a useless, fallacious argument.
Personal stories are fine[1], but it's worth keeping in mind that one of the pre-eminent unironic peddlers of anecdotal evidence as proof is Thomas friggin' Friedman.
In discussion forums I'm okay with the preface, because I read it as something like an implicit request for more information, "I think I've noticed [x] but don't have any real data, anyone know something further?" But I wouldn't write an article (not even an essay-length blog post) based on that premise.
>> People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal, but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.
maybe we just subconsciously hope that maybe, someday, someone/thing/program will just come along and compile all our "just anecdotes" into real, hard, data? So we just have to write it down, just in-case maybe that person is reading our story right now!
