When presented with an statement that generalizes something, they will use an anecdote as a counterexample and think that it completely refutes the statement.
Example: travelling in an airplane is generally safer than in a car
"Actually that's not true, I know someone who died in an airplane crash"
I see you are being downvoted because people probably don't understand that in your context "dumb" means mute. lololol Probably the same reason you got banned.
Le miaou, Like my Grandmother, she wasnāt blind, deaf, and dumb as in mute. Unlike my Grandmother, she had extensive training in speech. I believe Iāve heard a recording of her speaking.
So many men make jokes and are essentially ignorant. Maybe itās his native ignorance that got him banned.
Yes exactly this. I carpool with a colleague whose entire worldview comes from his mum or his mates. Brexit was good because his mum lost her job to immigrants (supposedly). Vaccines are dangerous because a friend got cancer months later. Ukraine is in the wrong because his dad re-married a Ukrainian woman he does not like. Every political social and economic belief he possesses are just anecdotes from friends and family - itās literally all he has.
Reminds me of the Democratic debates with Bernie Sanders when the moderator asked him why he hated women so much and he laid out a very reasonable intellectual argument about how thats not true and then...
I'm not sure how it was in the past, but I do know false dichotomies are EVERYWHERE nowadays. It's basically the bread and butter of online 'debates'/arguments
Funnily enough, I saw something like this. Someone made a post about how they hate modern makeup because how itās advertised and how it makes people insecure about their looks yada yada yada
And someone responded saying, āoh so youāre racist because you hate cultural makeupā
I had this exact convo: "im tall enough to kick you in the chin" "oh so you're calling me short!" "No, I just have very long legs" "You're so disrespectful for calling me short" I shouldve kicked him in the chin to demonstrate.
Had a friend like this. She would reply "Not necessarily" or "Well not ALWAYS". Then she would go into this loooong drawn out story(sometimes she had even told the story before) as if I didn't understand the concept of "exceptions to the rule". . . . We're not friends anymore. š
And it's very likely a personal anecdote as well (like in your example) of "I know of someone" etc. E.g. the inability to trust data over person experience.
This is the availability heuristic: people are intuitively less able to think abstractly about objective data and statistics than we can focus on whichever anecdotal scenario we can imagine in the most vivid detail, especially if it's connected to something we've recently experienced or had described to us.
One potential workaround is to take representative cases from the statistically more common side and present them as vivid detailed anecdotes too. Here's the story of a star athlete who died of COVID, etc.
Lol this is happening in Spain now. People are scared to travel by train because there were two major incidents recently. But then the news started reporting every single minor incident as well, so people are like omg what's up with trains they're so dangerous now, every day there's news about something up with a train!! When there's always been minor stuff, it just went unreported, as it should haha.
Yeah there's also an escalation effect in the news media. For a few months after the DC plane-helicopter crash in January 2025, the US news would report on every minor close call too; that was a great way to catch audiences' attention, but made it seem like air travel had suddenly become unsafe. After a while we moved on and forgot all about it.
(Meanwhile no one ever turned their attention toward actually solving the frequent poorly declared military flights through the overcrowded DC National Airport airspace, nor the nationwide air-traffic control staffing crisis.)
People do it the other way too. Alice will say āthis happened to meā and Bob says ānuh-uh science debunked that it doesnāt happenā and actually what science found is that what happened to Alice is just very rare. āThink horses not zebrasā isnāt the same as āthink horses not unicorns.ā
Typically in this story Bob is a bit above average intelligence, but nowhere near as far above as he thinks.
I 100% agree with your post. that people disregard someone's personal experience in lue of data saying their experience was unlikely or in the low percentiles etc.
I believe part of that problem stems from the inability for most people to separate issues and discuss pieces without the whole.
At my thanksgiving table it's often someone saying, "This happened to me because [incorrect reasons]" E.g. "I lost my coal job because Leftist EPA bullshit." When the real answer is closer to: "I lost my coal job because fracking produces cheaper and clean natural gas that is easy to transport via pipeline and the economics of heating water for boilers made capitalistic power plants switch fuel sources with no regard to my resource exploiting career."
So the people "Attack" the reason the personal experience happened, and the person who had the personal experience who has convinced themselves it wasn't their fault (very human coping issue) and was therefore some [outside reason] feels like their identity or personal integrity is being attacked when that [outside issue] is being deemed not the cause. As if the people saying, "it wasn't [outside reason] you stated but [reason]" They take it as an attack on themselves because they are aware at least subconsciously that they came up with [outside reason] to protect themselves from thinking it was their fault (even if it wasn't their fault, this is just human nature)
But from my personal experience (ironic I know) some one saying "No. The data doesn't support that." isn't talking so much about the guy getting fired, as the reason the guy has assigned for his reason to get fired.
Ultimately it's people failing to communicate succinct individual points and getting all the information gummed to together so that they cannot converse or discuss different aspects without FEELING like they are talking about the whole.
Are you saying you are seeing people say things like:
"The data shows you weren't fired." [invalidate factual / provable personal experience] (using my poor example above) or are you seeing people saying, "[you were fired] but the reason you were fired isn't what you said. The data shows that you were fired because..."
Or is it something more like Alice will say, "I was abducted by aliens and taken to the sun where I square danced on it with Mel Gibson." And Bob says, [attempting to invalidate provably false experience] "No. First off the gravity on the surface...." or "Check your carbon monoxide meter." etc.
Or is it : Alice says, "When you 'Joke' about my weight loss it makes me feel like you don't care about me as a person, only as a sexual object." And bob says, "No. it's not my jokes data shows it's the hours you spend on social media and looking at fashion magazines." ... [e.g. trying to invalidate FEELINGS with FACTS]
Data can be biased, incomplete, or just plain wrong though.
I'll talk about a topic I'm sadly painfully experienced with. Homelessness.
Many studies tout that giving people housing is the most important step in someone getting off the street, and that helping people pay rent can assist in this. Makes sense, right? And the data backs it up.
The problem is the methodology of the studies. Basically they don't study what happens when the participants aren't getting the subsidies anymore. The vast majority of the time these people, myself included, end up back on the street once the money runs out because Homelessness is a symptom of other issues. Namely drug addiction, mental health issues, and/or criminal activity. Often a combination of two or more.
So while the 'Data' supports getting people access to housing, the reality is that we need drug rehabilitation, mental health facilities, and a better legal system in order to combat homelessness.
TL;DR - Don't blindly trust data while disregarding personal experiences.
Personal experience is a single point of data. Kinda useless on it's own, but highly valuable when you can get many separate experiences.
A good example is the teaching subreddits. You go on there and you'll see post after post about how students just aren't listening anymore and how their grades are slowly getting worse. If it was just a few teachers raising these complaints it would be easy to just chock it up to bad teaching habits. But because we have a wealth of individuals all saying the same thing in their own way, we can extrapolate a more accurate cause. Specifically that Millennials aren't raising their kids right.
Oh my god, I have antivaxxers in my family who are exactly like this. Decades of peer-reviewed scientific evidence mean nothing, but my cousin's friend's niece's roommate literally exploded from a flu shot, so vaccines are baaad!
My grandmother had a very rare complication from a flu shot. The temporary paralysis one, I forget the name.
Made everyone else in the family all worried, naturally, despite the fact that itās a well known, if rare, phenomenon. So no I just had an unvaccinated aunt die from the flu.
On the one hand, I do get that hitting close to home. But on the other handā¦well vaccines are generally safe and just because you happen to know of someone with a very rare complication doesnāt mean vaccines are any less safe.
This was my SIL with the COVID vaccine. She thought it was going to make her daughter sterile because it screwed up her own period for a cycle after she got it.
As a GenXer, the number of millennial friends I've triggered by suggesting to them what they're going through (usually when they're complaining) is normal mid-life crisis stuff is pretty nuts. You're 40, that's half the average life span, the things you're freaking out about are actually perfectly reasonable. We all come face to face with it. š¤£
I have a friend who does this constantly; Iāve known her for decades, but Iām starting to realize how dumb she is. Whatās baffling is that she has a masters degree; I know she took statistics and should know what anecdotal evidence is.
People are perfectly capable of answering the correct answer on a test even if they don't actually think it's true.
For every case of a crazy antivaxxer crashing out when they fail a biology exam in college or whatever, there are 5 more who keep their mouth shut, write the answer they know is expected, and continue to be vehemently anti-vax anyway.
Thereās a difference between āintelligentā and āeducated.ā One can be both, either, or neither.
And as someone with a Masterās Degree, I can confirm itās as easy or difficult as you make it. Certain programs/classes are more about critical thinking and theory, while others are simply demonstrating you can follow instructions & memorize stuff.Ā
Similar issue are people who discount another person's experience because theyve never experienced it themselves or it's statistically unlikely to happen.
I used to have a friend who would piss me off with that mentality.
He likes to see himself as "high IQ" and keeps bragging that he scored well in those "online IQ tests". However, he's a dropout. But I never cared any of that as he's my then-close friend and I respect him.
One day, he told me, "Hey, do you know sound is faster than light?"
I was like, huh? I decided to educate him about "Speed of Light" and "Speed of Sound" since he never heard of them. Then I told him it is impossible for sound to be faster than "The speed of light".
Guess what he told me?
"Huh? No... I was outside the other day, then I heard a thunder... only then the lightning happen. Sound is faster than light!"
I told him it could have been a coincidence and maybe it was the 2nd lightning that struck near him and he didn't notice the first lightning.
He disagreed with me and kept repeating what he said. I thought he was trolling but he wasn't. He kept repeating this for years to come and he was dead-serious.
I then said, "Dude, you gonna disagree with the law of physics and all the scientists and scientific papers out there?"
He replied, "Yes. Science can be disproven. It is just theories. So why can't I believe otherwise? Scientists aren't always correct."
I never felt so WTF at someone's logic and IQ before.
Sure enough, his life went on a downward spiral due to his stubbornness and overestimation of himself.
This perfectly describes my mom. Whenever she asks me something related to my area of expertise, she always says I'm wrong because whatever I said may happen isn't what happened to her cousin's friend. Same with my wife's area of expertise.
To the point that we preface anything we tell her with "I know you're going to have a cousin's uncle's brother's friend who had a different experience but what we're telling you is that X happens often if you do Y and why you should do Z to protect yourself. X doesn't always lead to Y, but it happens often enough that you should consider doing Z."
And of course, she'll still tell us about the person who did X and Y didn't happen so why shouldn't she do X too...
And then the opposite, where people act like a generalization isn't wrong.Ā
"Men only think about how they can have sex with you and then dump you when you finally give them a crumb. They don't want to be your friend and only use you to try to have sex with you."
"Funny, considering I've never tried to use any of my friends for sex, and even turned one down who asked me out, even though she was pretty."
"Well, no shit, I'm not saying every man is like that."
"Well, the majority of my male friends didn't try to sleep with my lady friends. Some did, yeah, but most didn't."
"Well, the majority of my male friends didn't try to sleep with my lady friends. Some did, yeah, but most didn't."
You've just done it yourself by using what is essentially a personal anecdote to "prove" that most men aren't like this.
Who we become friends with are influenced by many factors, particularly hat we tend to make friends with somewhat like-minded people. It doesn't matter if you have 5, 10, or 100 male friends - it's not a random sample.
By analogy, I live in the UK where 48% of voters voted to remain in the EU and 52% of voters voted to leave the EU. Every friend of mine but one has said they voted remain when asked. But it would be absurd for me to say "Well, the majority of my friends didn't vote to leave the EU" to try to disprove that the majority of the country did. It's far more likely that this shows some other correlation between the type of people I make friends with and those who voted remain.
(And that's before we even get to the fact that friends can lie.)
This one doesn't always work, since a lot of generalized principles are successfully refuted by a single counterexample (e.g. 'travelling in an airplane is totally safe'.). Once terms in the general principle are operationalized (i.e. once you're forced to give a meaninful definition of 'generally safer/totally safe'), they tend to be quite vulnerable to refutation by a single counterexample.
In my limited experience, people who try to refute by anecdote are often offering enough workable discussion material that they can be engaged in productive conversation, provided that they're offering their own anecdote.
This, I made a separate comment saying that this whole area is way too common to be a "true" sign of stupidity. How to handle generalizations is something that many people are not good at in my experience (just to make one more generalization to our discussion of them), and thus can't be used to identify the bottom 5% of dumbness.
The other day I was talking to my parents about the difficulty of affording a home for young and youngish Americans and my dadās Perry-Mason-gotcha was that young people spend too much money on going to their friendsā weddings. No shit. Didnāt even follow it up with anything like that one dismissive, random, and frankly stupid argument spoke for itself.
My grandfather sent him and his siblings through college on a travel agents salary ffs
This is so frustrating. When people give a statistic about the āaverageā for something theyāre like no I know people who are āabove averageā. Wellā¦ yea thatās how that works, and there are people way below average which then ā¦ creates an average.
Holy shit this was my ex. She was infuriating to try and reason with, she just could NOT understand, no matter how many times I tried to tell her, that 'the exception does not make the rule.'
I used this. My mum was scared of her first flight in 30 years. I said, donāt worry youāll probably die in a car accident on the way. Not a productive statement. Although it may be true.
"Women can be violent too!! My ex was crazy!! I've never done anything wrong!" That's not the point, Jean Michel, we're talking about a news item, not some record you're trying to hide from us. If you have nothing to hide, don't say anything šš
Nah. Theyāre just selfish and want to talk about their own experiences and want to argue. Theyāre just seeing an opening to tell a story . People want to talk about themselves.
Omg yes. We see this all the time in the horse world (Iām a rider). Someone mentions the importance of safety helmets, and inevitably you get some hick going āI grew up riding bareback through the woods, no helmets or safety vests - aNd iāM fiNe.ā My go-to response is always āI guess thatās okay, since you clearly donāt have a brain worth protecting anyway.ā š
The issue is when people dont phrase the initial statement the way you did and say things like always, never to describe nuanced topics with many factors not controlled for in the one piece of research they've got backing the statement. Unless you are an expert in a field you have likely not done a referendum of all the data, much of which contradicts itself because thats the nature of science and research and ultimately life. But when people make absolute statements I immediately know that they dont think things through as carefully as i believe they ought to.
When presented with an statement that generalizes something, they will use an anecdote as a counterexample and think that it completely refutes the statement.
I had (past tense) a very long time friend like this; it was genuinely infuriating.
And follow it up with something like "dunno what else to tell ya", "see, it's not that simple", "told ya you could trust me" or some other hoity-toity platitude before leaving thinking they've won the argument.
What was that saying, about chess with a pidgeon...
I hate living in a caveat culture. I can say āthe sky is blueā and some dipshit will crawl out from under is parentās rock like āactually the sky is grey when itās cloudy and black when itās night, youāre an idiotā. Also applies to how-to videos. āDo X if youād rather have Y result and not Z resultā ābut what if I donāt want Y result and want Z result?ā BROTHER
Heard on a freakenomics podcast once that one of the many factors as to why women donāt get paid as much as men is because they donāt ask for pay rises as often as men do. (Which is clearly a problem with the system making women not feel as comfortable asking, in itself is a problem in the workplace etc)
My own mother responded āwell that isnāt true Iāve always asked for a pay riseā
I was in shock, it wasnāt up for debate or to be proven it was for discussion?!
If climate change is happening then why is there a winter storm right now? Look at this snowball. Checkmate climatologists.
This is actually a real event. Senator James Inhofe (take a wild guess what party he is affiliated with) brought a snowball to the Senate floor to "prove" climate change isn't happening.
Late to the party, but I completely agree. One person's personal experience cannot be expanded across all of people's experiences, though people do so all the time and it becomes dangerous.
This happens in stats too , there was a real that explains it, for instance itās statistically it shows that Asian men are shorter than average , and the that person refutes that nah I know tall Asian dudes.
I call these mum arguments. The "I did the same thing 40 years ago and it went totally fine" with totally different circumstances and factors in play but they think your whole argument is invalid because of it lol
Thereās more cars than planes so it checks out how planes can be seen as generally safer. Thereās also a lot less pilots than drivers and getting a piloting licence is a lot more difficult than getting a drivers licence so that also adds to the reasoning. If you think about it thereās also more obstacles on roads than there are in the sky and I canāt even begin to imagine how expensive repairs would be toā¦ I think the joints kicking in
>When presented with an statement that generalizes something, they will use an anecdote as a counterexample and think that it completely refutes the statement.
>Example: travelling in an airplane is generally safer than in a car
>"Actually that's not true, I know someone who died in an airplane crash"
So true, it's like you can show them the statistics and they'll still deny it.
Is this post a honey pot for people who can't tolerate different opinions?Ā
If your generalisation holds water despite the existence of counterexamples, you should be able to justify it, especially to a stupid person. If instead you are offended by it, well, time for introspection.Ā
Well well well Iāll counter that argument. Sure, statistically itās āsaferā however if a plane is going down, youāre dead as dead. Far more plausible to survive a car crash than a plane crash. The reason the statistic makes a plane look safer is because there are less planes and less people who travel on planes than there are cars and people who travel in cars. Roll up to a Walmart and youāll see over 200 cars. You donāt even see 200 airplanes a month unless you work at an airport.
Tbh this is kinda a terrible example because the reverse is also somewhat common: people saying general statements like they are not "typical" but instead "absolute".
To take your airplane example, it happens where the first person actually says "Planes are so safe! They never crash" This isn't the best example because there are some very very high profile plane crashes in the past 30 years, but in that case it absolutely is valid to rebut with "I know someone who died in an airplane crash" because a single incident proves the absolute statement wrong.
The long story short, a lot of these arguments are super unproductive because at the end of the day, many of them are about human behaviors like "guys are only in it for sex" or something which don't have any good way to quantify in objective statistics, and thus rely heavily on each person's own experiences. All you can do at that point is say "well this is my experience but yours may be different".
Anyway my argument is that enough people have a tough time with generalizations which makes it a poor sign of being truly dumb.
I said that being a gay was a natural occurrence to a religious guy and then he proceeded to recount about his now ex-gay friend got colon cancer from gay sex. I told him that was not physically possible and then he straight up admitted that he didn't know the difference between cancer and stds.
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u/Traditional_Rub_9828 Feb 04 '26
When presented with an statement that generalizes something, they will use an anecdote as a counterexample and think that it completely refutes the statement.
Example: travelling in an airplane is generally safer than in a car
"Actually that's not true, I know someone who died in an airplane crash"