Mens Sana Foundation

can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone recount an experience to support a point he or she was trying to make only to have it dismissed out of hand as merely anecdotal, with the rejection usually followed by, "There’s no statistical evidence to support that."

Well, I submit to you that contrary to what many people appear to believe, anecdotal evidence is valid and reliable and statistical evidence is not. Indeed, The term "statistical evidence" is as much an oxymoron as is the term "pregnant virgin." Because if it’s statistical, it cannot be evidential.

You see, something must be experienced to be evidential. It must be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. It’s not insignificant that the synonyms given in the dictionary for the word "evident" are manifest, patent, distinct, obvious, apparent, plain, and clear. I submit that the only things that can be all of these are things that can be experienced. And no one has ever experienced a statistic. No one has ever seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled an average, a median, a mode, a standard deviation, a coefficient of correlation, or any other statistic.

So if someone says to me that he or she saw a 95-pound woman lift the front end of a 4,000 pound automobile so that her pinned son could scramble from under it to safety, that tells me more about what people are capable of than all the statistics in the world.

Or if someone tells me that he or she completely got rid of cancer, that tells me that cancer can disappear, all the statistics to the contrary notwithstanding.

One final comment.

The recounting of an experience, assuming that the teller of the anecdote is not lying, at least says something about the real world. Can any statistic do that? Nope.

Think about it.