Re:Bangkok plans to ban all street food by year′s end
by summerdown2 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @11:39AM
(#14148484)
I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
(Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be really careful that you've done the work and aren't just deluding yourself.
Or, to put it differently - every anecdote is really only a data point if you understand what exactly it's measuring and what has been excluded. If you haven't taken the care necessary, then it's very easy to draw false conclusions. People are really bad witnesses and really bad at seeing what is and isn't given in the information they think they have - particularly if the anecdote is time-shifted from the point it was taken.
Someone drops dead right after eating a strange fruit. Maybe they had heart disease and coincidentally died right after eating said fruit, but it's far more likely that the fruit had something to do with it. This is a perfectly statistically valid assumption, given that the vast majority of plants are toxic.
Once you live in a bayesian universe, every anecdote is data. Every data point might be incorrect; that's a given. The "plural of anecdote" line is just a particularly rigid way of frequentist thinking.