Anecdotal Quotes

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

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

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

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

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it ~ Henry Mintzberg

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century
the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports. ~ Don DeLillo

scaremongers - who unquestioningly champion anecdotal data, while meticulously examining every large, carefully conducted study on the same subject for any small chink that would permit them to dismiss it entirely. ~ Ben Goldacre

It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal. ~ Eric Gill

Society conspires against her from early infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: 'If you're not married by the time you're twenty-five, you'll have good reason to be ashamed'; 'if you laugh, you won't look dignified' ; 'if your face betrays your feelings, you'll look coarse'; 'if you mention the existence of a single body hair, you're repulsive' ; 'if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you're a whore'; if you enjoy eating, you're a pig'; 'if you take pleasure in sleeping, you're no better than a cow'; and so on.

These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren't taken so much to heart. ~ Amelie Nothomb

Before Twitter or Facebook, all the fandom that I knew about was anecdotal. ~ Rob Thomas

For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments. ~ Guy Consolmagno

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. ~ Jan Morris

Psychologisation describes the emphasis on psychological factors where there is little or no evidence to justify it (1). It's a process where relevant findings are ignored or downplayed in favour of data from incomplete examinations, flawed research or anecdotal reports.
In a clinical context, differential diagnoses may be dismissed prematurely while psychological explanations are readily accepted.
Psychologisation does not refer to situations where there is sound evidence that psychological factors play a significant role, or where all the arguments are discussed and the psychological explanations are deemed the most persuasive. ~ Ellen Goudsmit

It amazes me how much of what passes for knowledge in cancer therapy turns out to be incomplete, inadequate, and anecdotal. ~ Ralph W. Moss

It's the effect of these carbohydrates on insulin that would explain the dietary observations - the futility of calorie restriction, the relative ease of weight loss when carbohydrates are restricted, and perhaps two centuries of anecdotal observations that sweets, starches, bread, and beer are uniquely fattening. ~ Gary Taubes

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

I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life. ~ Richard Dawkins

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

According to both scientific and anecdotal research, it is clear that homework should be the exception, not the rule. Even the most inventive or meaningful assignments still infringe on the time that belongs to families. ~ Vicki Abeles

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. ~ Clement Greenberg

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

Here's in extreme example: the possibility of life after death. When considered rationally, there is no justification for believing that anything happens to anyone upon the moment of his or her death. There is no reasonable counter to the prospect of nothingness. Any anecdotal story about "floating toward a white light" or Shirley MacClain's past life on Atlantis or the details in Heaven Is for Real or automatically (and justifiably) dismissed by any secular intellectual. Yet this wholly logical position discounts the overwhelming likelihood that we currently don't know something critical about the experience of life, much less the ultimate conclusion to the experience. There are so many things we don't know about energy, or the way energy is transferred, or why energy (which can't be created or destroyed) exists at all. We can't truly conceive the conditions of a multidimensional reality, even though we're (probably) already living inside one. We have a limited understanding of consciousness. We have a limited understanding of time, and of the perception of time, and of the possibility that all time is happening at once. So while it seems unrealistic to seriously consider the prospect of life after death, it seems equally naïve to assume that our contemporary understanding of this phenomenon is remotely complete. We have no idea what we don't know, or what we'll eventually learn, or what might be true despite our perpetual inability to comprehend what that truth is.
Chuck Klosterman