TestHoopla! ProStatistical data that can be measured and verified!
Our focus here at TestHoopla is on statistical data that can be measured and verified. We take anecdotal evidence with a serious grain of salt. There are plenty of other good services out there who offer opinions, commentaries, good ole boy network, and play an important role in this industry. But as for us, we are all about answering the question, “Are they delivering as promised?”
What is anecdotal evidence?
In the Internet marketing world, it often takes the form of testimonials. For example: “This program is FANTASTIC! I’ve made thousands of dollars with it!” It’s brimming with enthusiasm, but there isn’t much to back up the implication that you will achieve similar results. It does show that you can find someone somewhere to say most anything.
Do you want more info about anecdotal evidence? The following is also found at our HitExchangeReport.com site.
What is Anecdotal Evidence, and most importantly why we don’t use it in our testing/rankings?
First, our testing is 100% independent and based on statistical data only.
On average we collect and analyze 1,000,000 hits for each report from a team of normal hit exchange users.
You can’t judge the effectiveness of a hit exchange based on the appearance of the website. It doesn’t help just because someone says it’s effective. The amount of members a hit exchange indicates it has can be misleading. What you need are facts.
Get The Current Hit Exchange Report Here!
Definitions of anecdotal evidence from online dictionary:
- Information passed along by word-of-mouth but not documented scientifically.
- Anecdotal evidence is an informal account of evidence in the form of an anecdote or hearsay.
One of the scientific rules is that anecdotal evidence doesn’t cut it. Suppose I tell you that I thought of a long-lost friend. Just then the phone rang, and it was my old friend. That’s a nice anecdote. So why doesn’t it prove anything about precognition?
If this story proved anything, it would be proving that the unlikely had happened. But there’s no way to tell if the event was in fact unlikely. Perhaps I think about the friend a lot. Perhaps I’ve thought of people a zillion times, and only one of them phoned. And there’s the lottery-ticket thing. The person with the winning ticket sees that as very unlikely. But someone had to win. So, how many other people thought of a long-lost friend, and got no call? I don’t know the answer. And until I know the answer, the anecdote doesn’t prove anything.
A large collection of anecdotes isn’t necessarily any better than a small collection. There are several famous cases where large groups of people all swore that some new remedy was a wonder cure. (For example, Mesmer’s “animal magnetism”.) The main value of the collection is that their number might inspire someone to look into the matter properly.
Anecdotes about health are often useless. This is because some number of patients will get well anyway, no matter what treatment they receive. If a cancer goes into remission, it is very human to think that some recent change caused a cure.
Anecdotes are also entirely too susceptible to being unverifiable. If someone tells a story, and you press him for details, it is entirely likely that he doesn’t have them. He can’t remember, it was long ago. Or, no doctor ever actually verified the disease, much less its cure. Or, it turns out it didn’t actually happen to him: it happened to his sister. If you force him to contact his sister, she remembers it differently. Or, worse, it turns out it happened to a friend of the sister. We are now chasing down a FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) story. FOAF stories are usually rumors or “urban legends”.
Get The Hit Exchange Report Here!
In all forms of anecdotal evidence, testing its reliability by objective independent assessment may be in doubt. This is a consequence of the informal way the information is gathered, documented, presented, or any combination of the three. The term is often used to describe evidence for which there is an absence of documentation. This leaves verification dependent on the credibility of the party presenting the evidence.
In science, anecdotal evidence has been defined as:
- “information that is not based on facts or careful study”
- “non-scientific observations or studies, which do not provide proof but may assist research efforts”
- “reports or observations of usually unscientific observers”
- “casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis”
- “information passed along by word-of-mouth but not documented scientifically”
Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as supporting evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific or pseudoscientific because various forms of cognitive bias may affect the collection or presentation of evidence. For instance, someone who claims to have had an encounter with a supernatural being or alien may present a very vivid story, but this is not falsifiable. This phenomenon can also happen to large groups of people through subjective validation.
Anecdotal evidence is also frequently misinterpreted via the availability heuristic, which leads to an overestimation of prevalence. Where a cause can be easily linked to an effect, people overestimate the likelihood of the cause having that effect (availability). In particular, vivid, emotionally-charged anecdotes seem more plausible, and are given greater weight. A related issue is that it is usually impossible to assess for every piece of anecdotal evidence, the rate of people not reporting that anecdotal evidence in the population.
A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the post hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involves inductive reasoning. For instance, if an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty or hasty generalization.
By contrast, in science and logic, the “relative strength of an explanation” is based upon its ability to be tested, proven to be due to the stated cause, and verified under neutral conditions in a manner that other researchers will agree has been performed competently, and can check for themselves.
Subscribe to the Hit Exchange Report now.
.