Woos and Experience

I've got six of these so far. Guess that qualifies as a series.

Granted, this comes from personal experience, and that requires taking it with a grain of salt, but in my experience, many woos prize personal experience above all other forms of evidence. This is precisely backwards.

There's a reason anecdotes are considered the least credible form of evidence. People have biases. These biases can change what details a person focuses their attention on. Lack of knowledge can make a known, boring phenomenon into a supernatural experience. That same lack of knowledge can also render them vulnerable to trickery a more wary person could see through. Biases can color a person's memory. Biases can force connections and causes where none exist.

When we point these things out, it's common for the woo to indignantly say we're accusing them of stupidity or dishonesty. That's hardly the case: Everyone has these problems. Often, the only dishonesty involved is that which the woo performs on himself: They aren't being honestly acknowledging their flawed nature. This is known as arrogance, and is one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with.

Raw volume of experience is worth nothing if you don't know how to take measures against your biases. I've seen ufologists so excited about seeing alien spacecraft that they apparently watch the sky every night, but can't even identify an airplane. Most cases don't go nearly that extreme, but those biases do affect a person's perceptions.

Those flaws that affect all of us are part and parcel of why we need science. Scientists don't perform statistical analysis for the fun of it. They don't repeat experiments out of boredom. They don't replicate other people's work for the "me too!" glory. They don't point out other people's experimental flaws in peer review because they're jerks. They do it because they're diligently double-checking all the work. Small mistakes can really add up over time, and science is quite often a field where lives and livelihood are at stake. Catching mistakes when they're still small in scope is vital.

Too many woos, however, spend their time thinking they can't make mistakes when it comes to personal experience.