Why personal anecdotes are for entertainment only

“My parents were terrible. I was constantly ignored and mentally abused as a child. As a consequence, my physical and mental health suffered and still today I have a hard time keeping my weight in check and keeping a job. One Christmas they even cheated me out of a present for some reason. I always suspected that they just enjoyed seeing me suffer.” — Dudley Dursley in 2040

Personal stories are the narration we have about life. We may even have a personal story explaining why we are a certain race, height, weight or intellect. It’s how we connect to each other emotionally and how we entertain one another with educational moral points about life.

It’s fine to have just-so-stories for small stuff, but dangerous to have them explain a great factor without any other evidence. At times you actually can explain how you got a certain way: “I got hit by a car and therefore got a brain injury.” It’s a clear cause and effect case. But what anecdote would explain a mix of heritability and random variability? Even if a factor is caused by specific environment alone there are so many biases influencing narrative stories that they are seldom fully factual. They are told to support a narrative understanding of something and are not exact recollections.

If a worker gets fired there will be one anecdote told by the boss and another told by the employee. Only listening to the individual who got fired won’t give you the full scope of the situation.

Anecdotes are also often wrongly used to replace science and data when people explain a worldview:

• Once I met a man who was super clever. He was from “certain race” and therefore I think all people from that race are clever.

Here a wrong conclusion is reached about people in the group based on just one single example. An anecdote does not replace the science of psychometrics. And even if you met 100 clever people from that race it’s not a random sample.

• All people who work in “certain job” are mean assholes. Just last week my cousin told me a story about a worker who...

Here a person has a worldview and found an anecdote to support it. You can easily find some anecdote to support any hateful and bigoted worldview. But yet again one anecdote doesn’t really prove a whole.

So when people tell you about their life situation using stories. Or when they tell you about the world using anecdotes you need to ask them about data and experiments if you want to seek the truth. Either way they won’t remember the full story with exact details.

It’s all comedic unless it turns into a horror story.