Fucking Anecdotes!

[Darth Raptor]

I need some very generalized advice here, because it's not just one issue. How do you respond when the experience of [insert honest, reputable, likable person] is cited as evidence in an argument? "Lance Corporal Soandso just got back from Iraq and says things are really improving!", "Doctor What'shisface prayed to God and a patient was revived who had zero possibility of recovery!"

The problem I'm having is that I know these people, they very probably aren't lying (just misled) and I'm at a loss for how to refute them without looking like an insufferable jackass.

[Pick]

Write it off as an outlier. If something crushed your house and a thousand experts say it was a falling tree, and one says it was a falling boulder, we'll usually assume it was a tree.

Worst case scenario? I sympathetically suggest that the individuals involved were somehow misled themselves. Such as, "I think that the doctor might very well feel that prayer was the only answer, but at the same time, no doctor is fully aware of every nuance of their patient's condition. Though he may feel that faith played an integral role in the patient's recovery, it is far more logical to assume that there was an unknown physical component. Science doesn't give us all the answers yet, but it does have a much better record of accurate results. After all, faith as a form of medicine was exactly the kind of thinking that brought us trepanning, for instance, while science brought us MRI's."

[Zero]

You could always talk to them about the unreliability of memory, and how memories can vary a bit over time after a given event depending on what we decide its purpose is. Validate this by pointing out that statistically, there is actually no difference between survival rate of christians and non-christians. Their personal anecdote, while close to them, is of questionable reliability, since memories can suck, while the statistics indicate that there's nothing helping christians survive more often than others.

[Srynerson]

I need some very generalized advice here, because it's not just one issue. How do you respond when the experience of [insert honest, reputable, likable person] is cited as evidence in an argument? "Lance Corporal Soandso just got back from Iraq and says things are really improving!", "Doctor What'shisface prayed to God and a patient was revived who had zero possibility of recovery!"

In a situation like the Iraq one, you can point out that the witness could only see a very small part of a much larger picture. This lets you be more gentle to the person you're talking with because you don't have to say that the witness is a liar, just that they don't have any special insight into the larger issue.

[Darth Wong]

Four words: "The numbers say otherwise."

Subjective impressions don't count for beans in science, even if they come from Lance Corporal WhatsHisFace who's a great guy and has a lovely house in Tennessee. Unless he can produce numbers for the situation in Iraq which somehow contradict the bleak numbers we're seeing for soldier and civilian deaths (as well as insurgent attacks), his testimony quite frankly doesn't mean shit. Similarly, unless the doctor can produce numbers showing that Christians have better on-average recovery rates than non-Christians, his testimony doesn't mean shit.

Of course, there's also the approach of pointing out that averages by nature incorporate many extremes. But there's something elegant about a 4-word rebuttal.

[Darth Servo]

Lies and exaggerations are two different things. For instance, the only patient who has "zero possibility of recovery" is the one with the tag on his toe.

[Count Dooku]

Compare what they said with other people, and make them prove that what they said was true. Reputability is not enough to make me take someone's word - I need proof.