How come every time we try to have a conversion, it always ends up all "point counterpoint" and "personal experience with the topic" and "differing personal experience" and "discussion of how those experiences relate to the topic"!? EVERY TIME!

Its almost as if all experience is subjective…

The only valuable conversation about such research is an objective discussion of the quality of the study at hand.

> The only valuable conversation about such research is an objective discussion of the quality of the study at hand.

No

People's lived experience is very useful

Those are called anecdotes.

Empirically, they're usually not nearly as useful as people think. People are on average unreliable observers of their own experiences.

Much better than individual anecdotes are collections of anecdotes that are searchable and somewhat categorized. A lot of old school drug forums provide this.

Much better still is systematically varying data and taking statistics to separate signal from noise.

Yep. I think anecdotal evidence is actually ranked as one of the lowest forms of evidence if I recall correctly from graduate school.