Speaker 1: We have a voicemail number. That number is 2192. David P, here is our friend Juan,
who sometimes refers to himself as the troll man. If he's asking the question he asks in this
voicemail, genuinely, it's actually a good one. Speaker 3: Let's discuss this, Juan.
I have a question. Why are you against or discredit anecdote?
A lot of decisions that I make in my life for based on my experience, my anecdotal experience.
Am I to ignore that and just go myself by what 99% of the population goes through? That doesn't
make any sense. Hmm. Anecdotes are important. And people make decisions based on their experience.
Why? Why should anyone discredit or not guide themselves by their anecdotal experience?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is it's this is a great question. My anecdotes
are my experience. Why wouldn't I guide myself by that? The first thing is you have to be able
to distinguish when we say something is anecdotal. We're sort of by definition saying that it is not
representative or it's not a large enough sample size. Guiding oneself by their own experience
is great. For example, if you've driven to work the same way every day for a month
and it's taken, you know, less than 25, 20 minutes and no more than 35 minutes,
it is logical to say, based on my experience, I probably will never take under 20 minutes to get
to work or more than 35 in 95% of the times I drive to work. But that's not really anecdotal.
That's actually a large enough sample size to be able to say an anecdote would be you move to a new
city and you say, I start a new job tomorrow. Today's Sunday, I'm going to drive to work to
see how long it takes. But it's L.A. and the Oscars are going on that day. And so traffic
is crazy. And it takes you 90 minutes to do the drive on Sunday to then say, well, my experience
is the drive took 90 minutes. I'm going to plan on 90 minutes tomorrow, Monday morning.
That would be incorrectly making decisions based on anecdotal experience. Personal experience can
be anecdotal or it can be comprehensive. Anecdotes are useful for causation. Okay, I have a headache.
I eat five lemons and the headache goes away. And I go, lemons must cause it must must prevent
headaches. Well, headaches usually go away on their own. Anyway, that one anecdote doesn't
tell me that lemons cure my headache. Even though it was my quote experience. It was an anecdotal
experience. You really need a double blind, randomized, controlled trial to look at that. And
then you also have to consider that headache is a condition. We have a regression to the mean where
it typically goes away and people go, I no longer have a headache, even if you do nothing. Anecdotes
aren't controlled. They're not representative. They're often a sample size of one or two or, you
know, they're also not systematically collected. Lots of people told me when they get a cold,
they make a tea from the leaves of Dostoyevsky novels. They drink it and the cold goes away
within a couple of days. Well, it's a biased group of people who tried something weird. They might
be particularly interested in telling others about it, whereas lots of people get a cold and they go,
There's no treatment for it. I'm going to wait 3 to 5 days and then it'll be gone. And they don't
mention to you, Hey, you know what? Nothing. I tried, worked, so the cold eventually went away.
So these are not systematically collected anecdotes. So. I hope that what I'm saying
is clear. But when Juan says, what's wrong with anecdotes, anecdotes are my experience.
Experience can be anecdotal or it can be comprehensive. I'll give you another example.
Every day I do this show from only my own experience, from only my own experience,
I'm able to judge how long is it going to take me to produce the show today? Okay. And, you know,
the show itself is 55 minutes and then we do a 15 minute bonus show and whatever. That's
an hour and 10 minutes. But I know there's breaks and whatever. And I go, listen, I need just under
2 hours to produce the show. It's only based on what I've experienced, but it's not anecdotal
in the sense that it's a comprehensive experience over years of doing this. And it is of predictive
value. It's different than if you say, Hey, David, today you're hosting some other show.
And I do it once and it takes me 4 hours and I go, I guess this show takes 4 hours to produce. Well,
no, it was your first time doing it. You're not experienced at doing it yet.
That's the difference. I hope that it's clear we have a great bonus show for you today.
We're going to talk about Gavin Newsom 2024. We are there's polling now about Gavin Newsom 2024.
We are going to talk about gas prices going down in the United States 21 days in a row.
This must be Joe Biden's doing right. I mean, if it's Joe Biden's fault that the gas prices went
up, it must be Joe Biden's fault that the gas prices went down or not. We will discuss and we
will also give you the latest with basketball player Brittney Griner. Griner, sorry, who
has written a letter to Joe Biden asking for help. All of those stories and more on today's
bonus show. Sign up at join Cox. Unidentified: And dot com.