I came across a plea today on Facebook,
asking for people to send to a particular individual stories about the negative
impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially called “Obamacare,” for
the president who signed it into law. I
pointed out that anecdotes are not good evidence, and I had objections to their
use as such, since I feel it is emotionally manipulative and therefore not
totally truthful. I was met by a lot of
opinions counter to my own. The arguments were fairly varied, there were some
ad hominem attacks, but most seemed to take my use of the word “anecdote” as
some sort of insult, so I thought I’d write a short piece explaining anecdotal
evidence, appeals to emotion, and the part I often see them play in politics. Here is the post:
I saw it because it was shared by
Julie Borowski, who does some great videos on libertarian issues on youtube, check her out:
I. Anecdotal Evidence.
Anecdotal evidence isn’t really
evidence, at least in the clinical or scientific sense. It is a story, or an example, usually
involving a real person or a particular case. Moreover, it is often used in the
place of evidence, supporting or intending to lead to a particular conclusion.
Facts only become evidence in the context of a conclusion, like saying “smokers
die of heart disease at a higher rate than non-smokers” supporting “People
should not smoke.” Telling a story about
a particular negative impact of the ACA, like saying, “This is Dan and Rachel.
Obamacare cost them $10,000,” is an anecdote; a story. It might make you feel bad, but it doesn’t
represent the negative impact of the ACA for anyone beyond them. I could tell
you a story about my father being killed by a truck. Would you be persuaded to
ban trucks? It’s an anecdote, and isn’t
sufficient for the support of most arguments.
II. Confirmation Bias.
Anecdotal
evidence tends to contain elements of confirmation bias, which is a logical
fallacy where one ignores evidence that is contrary to one’s argument or
conclusion. The woman in the link was essentially asking for such. She did not ask for positive stories about
the ACA, she asked for specifically negative ones. If the stories were truly
evidence, they would be neutral to the collector, who would then form a
conclusion from it, not the other way around.
III. Data and
Presentation.
Somebody
asked, “What is the amount of stories of people being affected [that would]
drive us over the hump of "anecdotal"? 10,000 stories?” (brackets
added by the author of this article). The short answer is that stories cannot
be evidence until they are put in context of an argument, and then, who would
read them? When dealing with statistics it is the commonalities that matter and
must be presented; the facts of the story are superfluous beyond the
commonality they have with one another.
Here is a fact:
Under Obamacare, 30-year-old men face average premium hikes
of 260%
This is data that would be common to all the people
affected, including myself. They may
live in New York or Florida, be gay or straight, be black of white. What matters about the data is the
commonality that allows us to put it in context. If I said, “I’m seeing a 260% increase in my
health insurance premiums,” you could not consider it evidence that the AVERAGE
30 year-old man would see a jump in his premiums. Only data collection can support that.
II. Emotional
Manipulation.
Why do we
tell so many stories? Why are there so
many human interest pieces on the news?
In short, they are effective, or the news providers wouldn’t use them.
Politicians would abandon all appeals to emotion if voters did not respond to
them well. That’s really what anecdotes are; They aren’t evidence.
Is
emotional manipulation truth? The story
might be true, on some level, but is the decision that is a reaction to that
story based on truth. Essentially it is
not, or it would be made with reason and evidence instead of just emotion. The story
does not create an honest relationship between the speaker and the listener. In
fact, the speaker has made an assumption on some level that the listener will
not respond to evidence alone. At this
point the rationalization for engaging in emotional manipulation is the ends:
convincing someone of the correct position for the wrong reasons.
IV. Moral Arguments.
Whether or not the end justifies
the means has been a topic in morality and ethics discussions since the dawn of
time. Those of you who know me know my
opinion on it: action is always the locus of discretion in morality. When you make an ends-justifies-means
argument, or imply it through your actions, you are representing an entire
moral system that moves the locus of discretion away from the actions
themselves to the consequences (or intent, if you are a Kantian).
What is interesting about the above
the appeal for stories is that they desire to show the negative impact (the
consequences of means) of the implementation of the ACA when the originators
consider such consequences as being justified by their perceived ends. They are
essentially making a moral argument that the end does not justify the means
while simultaneously utilizing actions that support the opposite conclusion.
The moral argument is self-contradictory if you yourself are unwilling to apply
it.
A true moral argument against the
ACA is actually quite easy to make, especially if you use libertarian morals:
Killing people is wrong.
If you don’t get health insurance,
the government will tax/fine you (for the purposes of this argument those
actions are interchangeable).
If you don’t pay the fine, the
government will eventually arrest you.
If you feel the arrest is unjust,
and refuse to be imprisoned, you will be killed.
The ACA is immoral/evil.
V. A Fight With Mike Tyson.
The left
has been doing the emotional manipulation game a very long time. The image of
the right as being heartless automatons is mostly a product of how good the
left is at evoking emotion in people. Emotional appeal is their world, and you
better be prepared if you want to step into the ring with them, because it will be like jumping into a fight with Mike Tyson in his prime. If you were
wanting to knock them out, you would have a very hard time of it, especially in
the health care debate.
This is ultimately the problem with
exchanging stories: there is no end to them, and the listener is left to decide
the merits of them on a one-to-one basis, rather than as a whole field of
evidence. You can tell a very touching story about the financial hardships
brought on by the ACA on a particular family, but the other side can merely
tell their own story about someone who died because they didn't have health
insurance (I used Chuck Schuldiner of Death as an example). If you weigh these two stories on their own,
and believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or that
greater needs outweigh lesser ones, than even logically you will lose the
argument.
The real argument attempting to be
made is that the amount of pain inflicted by the law is greater than that it
prevents. One can only make this argument beyond anecdotes, in the world of
real, large-scale evidence. You could
certainly add anecdotes to real evidence, but what does that accomplish? Either someone is persuaded by reason or they
aren’t; I don’t believe you can add reason and emotion together and reach some
threshold that tips the scales in your favor.
VI. Summation
Define your position. Make real
arguments with meaningful evidence and avoid biasing it. Follow through with
consistent moral ideology. Make pragmatic and trade-off arguments with
evidence, not appeals to emotion. Don’t resort to tactics that are
intellectually and morally inferior to reason.
The Mike Tyson reference is one I see used a lot by Stephan Molyneux, a brilliant libertarian philosopher, and it is usually quite a good analogy. Check him out at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/
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