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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

One individual is not 'empirical evidence.'

I would say that any number of individuals "after the fact" are kind of weak as evidence. The very best empirical science is making a prediction of some new thing we've never seen before, and then testing the prediction.

So we don't dig up a bunch of bones and look for evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds, we predict that if we dig, we will find something that looks a little like a dinosaur and a little like a bird, and then we dig.

Individuals and stories are part of good conversation. Skraushaar's comment was relevant and enjoyable.

Reflexive ideological dismissals, on the other hand, are just tedious.

Absolutely. For conversational value, it's great. But in a discussion about empirical research, it's misleading at best.

I agree. Nobody would have realized that this was just a single person's story if it hadn't been pointed out. Thank you; I was almost about to add a "biological mother's profession" and "biological father's profession" field to our recruiting questionnaire, and have been spared an embarrassment.

It is HIS empirical evidence. It's his evidence based on his observation.

It's a meaningless observation. One anecdote is not statistically relevant.

Self-reports typically don't even count as one data point, because they're notoriously unreliable. Reports about one's childhood and motivations, doubly so. There's a reason psychology as a science is no longer based primarily on introspection, as it was in the 19th century.

Exceptions if people's self-conceptions are what is actually being studied; in that case collecting self-reports can be legitimate data-collection.

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