The ‘here’ in the first para refers to Secular Cafe, from which this is reposted.
In a number of threads, here and in other places, I’ve seen discussions – sometimes more than a little vituperative – concerning the value or otherwise of anecdotal evidence.
To start with my current position on it before commenting further.
I think that anecdotal evidence is evidence, but with three little caveats.
It is often, IMV, poor evidence, it is sometimes evidence of something other than what the anecdote purports to be evidence of, and it is rather infrequently later confirmed by later observations which have physical rather than anecdotal evidence behind them.
Having got that out of the way, an in-exhaustive list to identify the sort of alleged phenomena in which anecdotal evidence raises its head, in no particular order but as they spring to mind, with a few exceptions which I am anxious to include.
Ghosts, the effectiveness of clairvoyance, the effectiveness of astrology, the effect (or otherwise) of the full moon on madness, hospital admissions et al, sightings of monsters on various lakes, UFO sightings, alien abductions, the power of prayer, what may broadly be called religious or spiritual experiences, unusual and hard or impossible to replicate physical phenomena.
For all of these, and others, I’d see it as important to keep a few things in mind.
It is known that people sometimes lie, it is known that people sometimes exaggerate, it is known that sometimes some people, for want of a better word, go mad, and there has been a certain amount of work done what can sometimes lead people to be simply mistaken. http://www.skepdic.com/hiddenpersuaders.html
Now back to the phenomena.
To take the easiest to write about first, off the top of my head I can think of two cases where phenomena which were reported many times anecdotally were dismissed by the science of their day but which turned out to be real phenomena, and one in which AFAIK the jury is still out.
One being the existence of meteorites. It is hard to believe now that these were dismissed by scientists of the day, but so it was.
The other being freak giant waves, which were dismissed by science until the last few decades, since they didn’t fit what was known, and, it seems, was thought to be all that needed to be known, about ocean waves. They are real.
And then there is ball lightning. Jury still out, I think.
Back to the others – Lunar effects have been looked at, and it seems that they don’t work. Confirmation bias at work.
Lake monsters – some have been shown to be fraudulent, but some mistaken, none validated. However looking at the sightings has provided a couple of possible physical explanations for why people might believe they see, but actually interpret as, monsters rearing heads out of the water, or appearing to swim upstream. The mirage effects of layers of different temperature air, and the seiche effect respectively.
Fringe medicine – well most of the rationales behind the alleged treatments seem entirely bizarre, but at worst they can provide a bit of insight into the placebo effect, which it seems clear is real, if not all that well understood. I think there is more to it than that, though, which I shall return to later,
The power of prayer has had a few studies on it, which have failed to show any real effect, but confirm confirmation bias and perhaps more of the hidden persuaders.
Clairvoyance, tarot, astrology et all seem inconsilient with physics as it is known, but that so many people swear blind that it works takes us back again to the hidden persuaders.
As do ghosts. Poltergeists are a different matter, but AFAIK on every occasion that poltergeistic activity has been filmed a very real person seems to have been behind it.
The most interesting area to me, though, is religious/spiritual experience. Because I’ve had such experiences.
The most interesting area to me, though, is religious/spiritual experience. Because I’ve had such experiences. Lots of people claim to have had such experiences, in all sorts of contexts. Phenomena like the Toronto Blessing, pilgrimages, whether Christian, Islamic, Hindu, initiations, whether into some form or other of meditation, ordination, baptism, and in the practise of some sort of meditation, attendance at a mass or other religious service, being in the presence of someone regarded as holy, like the pope or a guru, listening to the chanting of the Vedas or the Latin mass, getting audited in a scientology setting, or one of its various offshoots. The list goes on.
My own such experiences were in the context of initiation and practice of meditation, listening to chanting, and the darshan of my then master. These experiences, coupled with the many anecdotal reports of experiences that seem to have a lot in common with them from a variety of largely incompatible metaphysical backgrounds leads me to believe that the most parsimonious explanation for there being so many anecdotes is that religio/spiritual experiences can be invoked, if not in everyone, from a large number of people from a great variety of backgrounds.
What they seem to me to have in common is some permutation or combination of hope and/or expectation and/or suspended disbelief in the subject, suggestion and/or direct statements from a person who assumes authority (priest, guru, teacher, auditor…), positive reinforcement from teacher and/or peers, ritual, and maybe other things too.
To return to an earlier point, much the same sort of factors that might lead people to feel better as a result of drinking homeopathic ‘medicine’, or having hands waved over them by a Reiki practioner etc.
Same sort of thing with acupuncture, but there are suggestions that there may be something physical involved in that latter case. Something to be explored.
So to sum up, I continue to maintain that anecdotal evidence is evidence, but evidence of what is less clear.
In some cases it has been evidence of physical phenomena that the conventional wisdom of the day has denied, but such incidences are few and far between.
In others it is evidence of phenomena other than what is being claimed by the anecdote teller. Here I would include the physical and psychological reasons why people believe they have seen lake monsters, and the nature of religio/spiritual experience, and why people believe themselves healed by quacks.
Evidence, IMV, of the power of suggestion, authority, ritual and mutual reinforcement.
Not evidence that homeopathy works -there are studies that verify that it doesn’t – or that religious experience maps onto reality.
Knowing the difference between those examples of anecdotal evidence that do have substance behind them and those which do not is hard to define, but that is not, IMV, a good reason to reject anecdotal evidence altogether. It is by examining it that one finds whether there is anything behind the anecdotes or not, and/or whether the anecdotes can tell us something about the human condition.
Comments?
Hi, David, welcome!
A couple of quick points:
I agree that anecdotes matter, if only because they are the only way in we have to what other people experience. I once was at a “laying on of hands” (Charismatic Renewal) service, and was duly laid on. I was a theist at the time, but also a skeptic about the charismatic stuff. I didn’t expect to feel anything magical, although I did expect to be moved. In a sense I was, although extremely distracted by the sensation itself. The guy wasn’t actually touching people, just putting his hands over their heads. And what it felt like was disconcertingly like having the contents of an egg broken over my head. It puzzles me to this day.
Second point:
I think it’s all “physical” 🙂
That sounds about right.
I’d say that it (anecdotal evidence) is sometimes suggestive, often misleading and rarely convincing.
The real problem is that the person offering anecdotal evidence often sees that evidence as very strong, and presumably as convincing to that person. But the audience is likely to see it as weak and unpersuasive.
Elizabeth,
Well you know what I mean. Physical in the sense that sticking pins might elicit endorphins or something. I’m well aware that at another level of reduction we both think all mental phenomena have a physical substrate, if that is the right word.
As far as the laying on of hands goes, it does seem to me that there is a lot of variation of susceptibility to suggestion in humans, and not one obviously related to intelligence.
Did any other people on that occasion seem to get a hit off it?
David
Of course. But I do think it’s a fuzzier demarcation than we intuitively assume.
I don’t know. I’ve heard of other skeptics who have been surprised by comparable experience. One friend told me about an another friend, Susanna, who did that foot massage thing (reflexology) and who wanted to have a go at me (it was when I was going through all kinds of fertility investigation hoops). So I thought “why not?” My friend said that she’d been surprised by what sounded like a very similar experience, which Susanna called “a Susanna special”. So I have to say, I rather expected a repeat. But when Susanna did her “Susanna special” I felt nothing.
So N of three: When I wasn’t expecting something I felt something; when I did, I didn’t; when my friend didn’t, she did.
hmm.
That would be consistent with a “real” phenomenon that is a bit sporadic – doesn’t always come when called.
Or with suggestion and imagination all round.
I do wonder, though, whether it’s possible that something like change in skin temperature (and thus radiant heat) might be the key thing, and we know that capillaries are sensitive to slight changes in changes in the autonomic nervous system. (That’s why we blush, or some of us do). So it wouldn’t surprise me if one could learn to change skin temperature “on demand”, or perhaps unreliably “on demand”, without knowing that’s what your doing, or that sometimes it doesn’t work.
Interesting that in a discussion of anecdotal evidence, several anecdotes emerge. That’s got to say something.
As above, when evaluating a claim, the degree of consilience with things “known” is important (pace Wittgenstein’s wonderful “On Certainty”). But not necessarily dispositive.
A second important question, or perhaps decision, is, “What does the anecdote (weak evidence) warrant?”
Where “belief” is not warranted (perhaps because of lack of consilience), “further investigation” may be – investigation meant to procure evidence of better quality. But perhaps not – life is too short to spend time investigating completely outlandish claims.
Now an anecdote: A professional woman (a speech and hearing therapist) once told me that one clear, sunny day, as she sat in her dining room, a large armchair moved rapidly across her living room floor, from one end to the other. All was otherwise quiet: no high winds, no quakes, no disturbances elsewhere in her house, no one home, etc. No one was in the chair (not even StephenB). She took this as evidence of the existence of spirits. She seemed utterly ernest.
This confronted me with a choice: she was accurately/truthfully reporting actual events, or something else.
Ultimately, I simply did not believe that her armchair had done that. Per Wittgenstein, if it is true that furniture sometimes moves about, as though propelled the spirits of deceased furniture movers, then the world is so different than I suppose it to be that nothing I currently take to be the main facts about the world can be trusted – even my recollection of having heard that anecdote.
So I chose “something else.”
Hi Lizzy,
Joe over at UD told me to come here, that you were asking after me. Thanks. I’m touched.
To the subject at hand:
My take on the OP is that it is written on top of a metaphysical position that everything that occurs ultimately has a physical or material explanation, so that if an anecdotal event cannot be fit into that paradigm, then it will be dismissed as the result someone being mistaken, lying, or mad, and if an event is capable of more than one interpretation, only the one which fits within the paradigm will be considered as possibly valid.
The result of this is that all anecdotal evidence that could possibly invalidate David’s paradigms will never be seriously considered, with the result that his position is protected from falsification. I personally see this as unfortunate, since I believe that his position is in fact wrong, as you already know.
For example, in the book, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, the author reports a number of events involving Indian sages that he personally witnessed that can only be classed as miraculous. I believe that they happened as reported, because that is the most reasonable explanation, given my own metaphysical position and my decision that the author was sane, honest, trustworthy, and indeed one of the spiritual master of our times.
Hi, Bruce! Lovely to see you! I’m busy all day today, but will respond later.
Cheers
Lizzie
Hi David,
I made the comment that your position is that ultimately everything has a physical or material explanation, to which you replied,
“New physics” is still physics. It’s still a physical or material explanation. What you preclude is, for example, the power of consciousness to perceive or affect the physical world in ways that have no physical explanation at all, eg., that a precognitive dream could actually perceive a future event.
As for the rest of your post, I will just have to respectfully disagree with regard to Yogananda’s credibility, and comment that it pretty much illustrates my point that the only explanations that you will entertain are those that conform to your worldview.
There’s always Randi’s offer for anyone who can bring special powers into a test situation.
I’ve had several experiences that other people attribute to special powers or events.
I’ve seen someone who wasn’t there; I’ve picked up the phone to call someone and found them already on the line.; I’ve had something like an out of body experience during surgery.
None of them have perturbed my sense that the ordinary interpretation of the world is more trustworthy.
I have done only limited reading around this subject, but it seems to me that these “special” events and situations can never be demonstrated or repeated under test conditions; and I can’t see for the life of me why that should be if the claimed special powers or happenings truly exist. Every fair test of “dowsing”, fails; same for remote card-reading, telekinesis etc.,etc. I don’t doubt that, at least in some cases, they are reported by people who truly believe that the event happened; but I cannot ignore all the cases of attempted fraud. No more do I forget that we share a planet with some people who will flock to a water-stain on a subway wall in the belief that it resembles the face of a prophet, and that resemblance was induced by supernatural means
Isn’t it odd. I think many have had the experience of someone calling unexpectedly, close to the time you were thinking of them – but willing that person to call never seems to work.
Bruce said
““New physics” is still physics. It’s still a physical or material explanation. What you preclude is, for example, the power of consciousness to perceive or affect the physical world in ways that have no physical explanation at all, eg., that a precognitive dream could actually perceive a future event.”
If it were to be demonstrated that the power of consciousness could do anything like that, as it was demonstrated that seemingly impossibly large waves exist, then I don’t see that there would be no physical explanation, but rather that some physics would have to be re-written to account for it.
AFAICT, though, no such demonstration has been forthcoming. Furthermore there have been many claims of the putative power of consciousness that have been successfully debunked, and/or the claimant being shown to be fraudulent.
Sai Baba, Carlos Casteneda, Lobsang Rampa and Uri Geller spring prominently to mind.
There is anecdotal evidence that is unconfirmed, sure, but there is also confirmation bias, and various other factors which can mislead.
David B
There is a fairly simple way to compare the relative magnitudes of energy involved in thought processes.
Life as we know it exists roughly within the range of energies for which water is liquid. This is a range encompassing about 0.005 electron volts (eV).
We also know that mammals experience hypothermia at approximately 15 Celsius and hyperthermia at approximately 40 Celsius. This is an energy range of about 0.001 eV.
Action potentials span a range of about 100 millivolts, so we know that the ion channels that allow these kinds of potential to propagate within the nervous system shut down with hypothermia and go chaotic with hyperthermia.
Solid matter such as iron and other metals are held together by mutual potential wells among atoms that are on the order of 0.1 eV deep.
Chemistry happens at energies on the order of 1.5 eV. Nuclear binding energies are on the order of millions of electron volts (MeV).
A joule is equivalent to 6.2 x 10^18 eV. This is the order of magnitude of energy required to move things in the physical world around.
So all we have to know is what undetectable, nonmaterial mechanism amplifies the energies of the electrical potentials in the brain by something like 20 orders of magnitude to produce noticeable effects of motion in the physical world.
Can it be shielded by metal or a copper screen of some sort?
It gets sillier from here on.
David,
Ok, here is an example of what I’m talking about. The American writer, Mark Twain, and his brother Henry once worked on riverboats on the Mississippi. One night Mark had a dream about his brother’s corpse lying in a metal coffin in his sister’s living room. It rested on two chairs, with a bouquet and a single crimson flower in the center. He told his sister about his dream.
Weeks later, his brother was killed in a massive explosion on a riverboat. Many others died and were buried in wooden coffins. But one onlooker felt such pity for young Henry that she raised the money for an expensive metal coffin. At the funeral, Mark was shocked to see the coffin as it was in his dream. As he stood over Henry’s casket, a woman placed a bouquet with a single red rose in the middle.
Now, one can come up with several explanations for this report from Mark Twain. My inclination is simply to believe the most straightforward explanation—Mark Twain actually foresaw the future in his dream. Based on what you have said so far, I expect that this is the one explanation that you would not entertain, because it does not fit within your paradigms.
Bruce David,
I don’t agree that yours is the most straightforward explanation. My belief in the truth of this anecdote is more than somewhat strained by the fact that Mark Twain, a writer and journalist, did not at the time of his dream, a) write down an account and have it solidly witnessed as to date: and b) warn his brother.
Putting that aside, why do you think that this reported ability to foresee the future is so very rare? Is it necessarily linked to some intense future trauma? Why?Might it be possible to learn how to do it?
(if so, bookies and casinos can look forward to a lean time – and my share trading account often bears witness to my needing to learn the way of it. When you come to think of it, the very existence of those industries bears witness to the lack of any general ability in the population to foresee the future – except inasmuch as the operators “foresee” the future (probabilistically) when they set the odds and prices)
Bruce David,
It is so far removed from what is deemed possible by physics at the moment, that alternative hypotheses seem rather more likely.
I would have to adjust this working hypothesis should it be confirmed that he told his sister about the alleged dream before the accident. I haven’t been right through google concerning this story, but none of the ones I have looked at mention the sister being told. Unless I missed it in skimming, but think not.
My tentative hypothesis is that under the stress of the time Twain had a strong sensation of deja vu, which was later confabulated into the dream story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
David
Anecdotal evidence is raw data; if it proves valuable in reaching a conclusion or not, time will tell. But it’s real value is as a warning against certainty: There is a famous story about peasants which went to the French academy with stones they claimed fell from the sky; The academicians threw them out, accusing them of being charlatans, since ‘everyone knew stones didn’t fall from the sky’. The peasants were carrying meteorites; the academicians of course were wrong; stones did fall from the ‘sky’…
Bruce David,
The notion of some people foreseeing the future is non problematic, since the Universe is (mostly) deterministic. What makes it problematic, from the stand point of empirical science, is its infrequency, and the incapacity to provoke such an event, which make it impossible to ‘test’. But then, it isn’t a problem if one does not conform to the idea that all phenomena are periodic…
How does one explain those who claim to see into the future yet don’t see into the past and get it right?
What is directional about seeing through time? Why is it directional?
Elizabeth,
Considering your ‘charismatic’ anecdote, shouldn’t it be a warning against holding a physicalist position? I don’t disagree with your ‘it’s all physical’, but only because I don’t consider the physical to be what the physicalists think it is. Reality is a mental construct, and the physical (matter/energy) is the structure of the images which constitute that construct; Physical laws describe the periodic behaviour of the images not under our willful control, and we exercise our imagination as willful control, only by following those laws. But, we have no way of verifying that such laws are the limits of physical behaviour. Thus experiences that violate ‘physical laws’ shouldn’t be negated, or explained away based on models, but simply noted and accepted as ‘unexplained’.
Mike Elzinga, I have no idea…
There is another peculiarity about clairvoyance that perhaps Elizabeth may be able to comment on since it falls into her area of expertise.
Predictions of the future apparently always involve events of importance to humans. Why might that be?
Why, for example, do we not hear of someone foreseeing, say, the death of a whale, or a tree falling on a bear in the woods? Certainly these are of consequence for the whale and the bear.
Human emotions are much more tied up in what happens to people, especially people who are close.
So much of these stories of the supernatural or paranormal involve things that produce strong human emotions and involve what happens to humans. I would think psychologists would have some insight into this.
Those of us in physics start making calculations of what kinds of forces and energies are involved; and then we ask what undetectable, nonmaterial process could do this. And we end up skeptical.
In my experience, paranormal events (I would never call them ‘supernatural’), are triggered by strong emotions, pertaining relatives or sexual attraction; that explains part of their present untestability.