Do bloggers know the difference? Not all, apparently. After posting about Vlahoss and Ross' anecdotal evidence, a certain blogger becomes confused:
...Hadley Vlahos and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross simply report what they've seen and heard while tending to dying patients. You instantly dismiss any and all apparent empirical evidence that challenges your rigid ideology.... http://disq.us/p/2x57mbi
Gemli's response includes this:
"It's good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out." --Physicist Richard Feynman
Yeah, if somebody tells a cool story then you might not want to count it as evidence for anything until you see some evidence that the story is actually true. It depends on the story, though, as well as on who tells it and on what the story is supposed to show.
I think it's literally impossible to sustain a completely uncompromising demand for evidence for everything because it just regresses. Somebody's evidence for their cool story is a link to a news story; what evidence is there that the news site is reliable? What evidence is there for that evidence? How sure can we be that hearing the story in the first place wasn't an auditory hallucination? Show me the evidence that I'm not just a brain in a jar.
I doubt that any form of evidence is absolutely reliable. Careful, quantitative measurements of simple physical quantities have sometimes turned out to be seriously wrong. I believe I read somewhere that measured values of important physical quantities often follow sigmoid curves (kind-of-S-shaped) over time. People agree on one value for a while, then new results start to drift away from that slightly, then somebody sticks their neck out and publishes a significantly different value, then further measurements steadily push the results a little further past even that bold correction, until we settle down on a new consensus that's quite a ways from the old consensus.
One hypothesis for the sigmoid pattern, with that slight weakening of the old consensus before a dam-break correction, is that new technology comes online to improve the measurement. Another, though, is that the pattern is largely psychological. Until the old consensus looks weak enough, people are afraid to rock the boat. Consciously or unconsciously, they systematically nudge their observations and their error analysis to obtain results that aren't too far from the consensus.
What's my evidence for that story about sigmoid curves in physics? Um, I think I read it somewhere, years ago. Maybe it was in a book by Feynman? He's famous, so that makes the story more believable, if it really was Feynman. Wherever I read it, I never did try to check for myself by tracking down historically published values for a sample of a dozen or more physical quantities. I just thought my source seemed authoritative and the story sounded plausible, so I've kind-of-believed it all these years.
And now you get to be part of the chain. You can feel free to continue it. A guy in Cincinnati broke the chain and his hamster got sick, while a lady in Lima passed on the story and she won a free coffee. Anyway, whether or not the sigmoid curve stuff is real, it is true that even hard-science experimental data can be unreliable. That stuff has got to be the easiest stuff about which to have confidence in our knowledge, and even there, you know, it's a science. It can take a lot of knowledge of your own just to be able to judge with confidence whether the lab that reported the measurement was likely to have gotten it right.
We're living in weird and interesting times, when epistemology is becoming the fourth R. Conclusions seem to be everywhere, now, but it's not much easier than it ever was to check them out thoroughly. I try to deal with it by keeping my opinions tentative about things I don't really know well, and at least checking stuff when it's easy. On some subjects I have enough knowledge or experience that I can spot-check claims of fact without too much effort. And I can accept somebody's claimed premises for the sake of argument and just analyse whether their subsequent logic is valid.
I try to avoid making strong assertions on difficult subjects that I don't really know. Epistemology itself is one of those subjects, for me. So I tend to be skeptical about anyone else's strong statements about what is or is not evidence.
Thank you for posting Marcus. I got a laugh out of that exchange as well.
You're welcome. I had to read twice when the blogger defined anecdotes as "empirical evidence" but then, this is the same guy who insists 'witnesses' (who were told that they were seeing gold plates that had a real history written on them in a fake language) constitute the gold standard of evidence.
But, he also believes he can find water by dousing, so I suppose his misunderstanding of the definitions of empirical and anecdotal is easily in line with that.
Thank you for posting Marcus. I got a laugh out of that exchange as well.
You're welcome. I had to read twice when the blogger defined anecdotes as "empirical evidence" but then, this is the same guy who insists 'witnesses' (who were told that they were seeing gold plates that had a real history written on them in a fake language) constitute the gold standard of evidence.
But, he also believes he can find water by dousing, so I suppose his misunderstanding of the definitions of empirical and anecdotal is easily in line with that.
It’s amusing watching a PhD BYU professor engage in arguments that are essentially “I know I am but what are you?” quality with gemli. Gemli is great at showing just how weak DCP is when you confront him with the fact that the evidence for Mormonism is utterly unconvincing to anyone who isn’t Mormon. That’s not because people aren’t examining it. That’s because the claims of Mormonism are completely at odds with our unbiased objective understanding of the world.
Mormonism and its “evidence” is a joke to anyone who doesn’t have a bias to believe it. Just like Scientology, and just like flat earth. No Jews built a civilization in the pre-Colombian Americas. It’s a complete fantasy and deep down DCP knows this.
You're welcome. I had to read twice when the blogger defined anecdotes as "empirical evidence" but then, this is the same guy who insists 'witnesses' (who were told that they were seeing gold plates that had a real history written on them in a fake language) constitute the gold standard of evidence. 