The Power Of The Anecdotal

Hey My J's,

It's me back again for your daily dose of random thoughts for the day is my thoughts and perhaps this is a bit similar to yesterdays post about lying to yourself. Believe it or not, but I was a very opinionated person, always wanting to share my views, my view is superior, my view is alternative, my view is the best course of action.

Sometimes It could be, lol even a broken clock is right twice a day but yeah I really used to think all my thoughts were pretty darn good. While my ability to reason has always been sound I never gave much thought to how I acquired information and I think it was a habit I picked up around peers and family.

I often fell prey to base my decisions on anecdotes evidence. Which is taking a heard from or seen experience and presenting it as fact, even if said fact goes against data.

The spoon feeder mentality

Our education system has done us a disservice and taught us what to think but focused almost nothing on how to think, how to reason, how to judge content, how to review inconsistancies in an argument, how to fact check, how to decern fact from opinion, how to engage bias and perhaps how peers and family should assist with that too but if you all beleive in a certain knowledge aquisiton system you're not going to break the cycle but only feed the flywheel.

We're all spoon fed from a young age and this is a comfortable way to learn and feels right because it is your routine, but it doesn't open up means for questioning concepts, sources, debate, to improve the content or derive value from information but simply to remember in order to repeat.

I would know because I was the same for many years, it takes time to diseducate yourself from the ways your education system and peers instill in you, but thankfully you have free will and if you have the desire you can change the way you think.

Word of mouth matters

When we present anecdotal evidence we often trust the source of the information more than the information itself, this can be a friend or how you've perceived something and who better to lie to you than yourself right? You know how your reasoning works, so it should be pretty easy to convince yourself of anything.

In some cases you could even be the source spreading your false narrative or misunderstanding to others, we now call that fake news but it's been doing on forever, it's just that social media has allowed it to reach more people faster.

To fact check, compare narratives and remove bias is not a natural human decision-making experience and in modern times with instant gratification and the consistent outsource of our cognitive ablities to social media, celebriteis, influencers and media figures, we're more suspectable than ever to anecdotal evidence. Perhaps a little nihilism might help counterbalance things?

Have your say

Do you also like to use anecdotal evidence? Has it ever landed you in trouble or in a disagreement?

Holla at me in the comments! All my commenters I will now refer to as Jessie. Jessie is a good friend of mine, but Jessies got a girl, and I want to make her mine.

So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, simply comment "I am a Jessie."

Let's connect

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