Quotes & Sayings About Anecdotal Evidence

What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence," Harry explained. "It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that's because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they're up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter. — Robert Klein

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless. — Katherine Dunn

Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'. — Barry Schwartz

Hardcovers will never completely disappear. They are delightful to hold; they feel weighty and substantial. But my anecdotal evidence suggests that the world is changing. — Christina Baker Kline

I've been among their critics [MBA programs]. Much of what I've seen in business schools is quite non-rigorous. Anecdotal histories are stretched to illustrate favored slogans. Evidence of their effectiveness is similarly anecdotal. — Charles R. Morris

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know. — Herman Cain

I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.) — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it - the harm that pornography does to women - is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence. — Richard Posner

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth — Temple Grandin

If the young man ate candy, the wrangler says, that's probably what's kept him alive so long. Glucose is a natural antidote to cyanide poisoning. Based on anecdotal evidence, glucose binds with
the cyanide to produce less toxic compounds. — Chuck Palahniuk

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. — Carl Sagan

The U.S has acquired reservoirs of goodwill around the globe over many years. But it is clear - from polling data and ample anecdotal evidence - that America is losing its allure in much of the world. — Lee H. Hamilton

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness. — Mary McCormack

All former counter-insurgency officers categorically denied having perpetrated torture during the Terror. In the case of at least one such research participant, anecdotal evidence from mutual contacts suggested otherwise. It is impossible to tell who, if any, of the former counter-insurgency officers featured in this chapter perpetrated torture during the Bheeshanaya. Eliciting confessions is not the aim of this book. My interest lies, instead, in exploring the ways in which 'perpetrators' of violence remember and reconstruct their disturbing pasts, and how they come to terms with it in the present. — Dhana Hughes

Life after death. Sex after marriage. While claims are made for the existence of both, the sources are oftentimes unreliable and the evidence, at best, anecdotal. — J.D. Lexx

It can only be hoped that the overwhelming factual (not anecdotal) evidence presented herein will arouse conductors and performers of all stripes to rededi-cate themselves to serving, rather than using, the art of music - espousing the notion and principle that a great composer's creations ought to be inherently respected and cherished. Perhaps one could then supplant the motto "nobody gives a damn about the composer" with the more benign, gracious - and simple - "all for the composer. — Gunther Schuller