Re: Anecdotal Evidence

[Guest guest]

My friend, with a West Coast metabolism, retired briefly to our room to freshen, leaving me dangerously alone to observe and ponder.

A tallish woman rules a crowded craps table. She leans forward to cast the dice and, as she bends, a large, single stone pendant swings away from a deep cleft between her pillowy breasts. As the pendant cum pendulum strains towards the upward limit of its arc, she forcefully ejects the two dotted cubes from her balled fist.

For an instant my attention is distracted by the pendant as she straightens and it retreats to the safe harbor of her cleavage. Resistive forces that reduce the amplitude of a free swinging pendulum, thus damping its travel and slowing its frequency, need not be calculated in this instance as the heavy stone meets meaty bone and stops. (The life of an engineer IS conflicted.)

With the stone once again safely ensconced in its epidermal vault, attention returns to the dice, still in chaotic motion as they carom off the felt bumper eight feet down range from the feminine fingers that launched them.

Time slows, sounds become indistinct, a drink is spilled and no one moves to avoid it, not while the dice are alive. They come to rest. A collective groan rises and is lost in the overall din of the gaming floor. The table is raked. Casinos are not built on the backs of winners.

I understand that I grow through introspection but I learn through the observations that precede the introspection. As the man and woman in matching Harley-son sweatshirts turn their backs on the table; as the man in the mahogany toupee, who never dreamed he would be referred to as “the man in the mahogany toupee†drains his Margarita and considers his options; as the 60 something matron, a caricature from ’s Gopher Prairie, inventories the contents of her hand bag (which she stubbornly refers to as a “pocketbookâ€) and calculates her losses; I am struck by the notion that we humans prefer a good story to probability and statistics.

The preference is so strong (with stories predating statistics by thousands of years) that we make major life decisions on the supposed strength of them.

People may spend weeks in research before choosing a new car, comparing ratings for quality, mileage, dependability, value and functionality. Mind made up, they conclude to visit the dealer on Saturday morning and consummate a deal. But, on Friday night, or Madeline relate their horror story of endless mechanical problems and dealer apathy on the same make and model of car selected. Based on this anecdotal tale of deficiencies with one automobile, our would-be buyers ignore the carefully compiled data for thousands of representative vehicles and…they start the search all over again.

The thought feels good in my head. Grounded and solid. Unassailable.

Her hand slips under my arm. “Did you miss me?â€

“Of course†I reply, as I finger the chips of uncertain value in my jacket pocket and look for a spot at the rail.

Her brother actually knows a guy from Vancouver who has a friend who broke the casino’s back at craps…not more than a few years ago.

Our lives are ruled by anecdotes.

(Stay tuned for the paradoxical influence of coincidence on probability or, why regression to the mean is nothing personal)

Carroll> From time to time someone puts a burr under my saddle about the> value of the experiences related by the men who have been good> enough to post their stories on my YANA - You Are Not Alone Now> www.yananow.org website. They say this anecdotal evidence is> of no value to men in their decision making process. I don’t> agree and I’ve had many e-mails from men who have visited the> site and found it of some use.> So it is gratifying to read this e-mail from Elsevier, the> medical publishers:...That is interesting.I think the kind of experience described in YANA is of greatvalue. The important thing is to understand the nature of

thatvalue. It can't tell a patient what the odds of success or sideeffects are for a particular treatment. However even clinicaltrials have great limitations in that regard since it is rare foractual treatment in a particular doctor's office or hospital toexactly match the conditions in the trial, or for the patient toexactly match the average of patients in the trial.However what the YANA stories do, and it is something that theclinical trial reports cannot do, is give a patient someunderstanding of what it is like to experience cancer and cancertreatment. Even better, YANA provides information about thewide range of experiences a patient can have. For any giventreatment there are stories of patients who did very well andpatients who did very badly, patients who came out of treatmentintact and possibly cured, and patients who come out of treatmentcrippled and facing their terminal

illness.Sometimes the numbers from the trials are just abstractions -useful for decision making but not telling the whole story. Thepersonal experiences supplement that story and flesh it out withhuman content.Alan