Thread by @datepsych

Very common in online discourse that someone will produce a Highly Convenient Anecdote or "personal experience" no matter how obscure the point. 🧵

The worst thing about these isn't even that they are anecdotal or nonrepresentative. That's true, but we are informed by our experiences nonetheless.

The worst thing is that they are often just entirely made up.

People also confuse "impression I have formed passively" with "personal experience."

For example, "thing I have seen other people say online" becomes "my personal experience."

Here are some tells:

They are often contextually implausible.

Man in Kansas: "actually everyone from Uganda that I know..."

Incel: "all of the Chads that I know..."

In fact, you should be skeptical of anyone's appeal to experience through a large group of friends unless you have reason to think they are a gregarious extravert (aka not a Twitter user).

One thing we know is that young men have friend groups smaller than ever before. Friend groups also shrink with time. And men past 30 or so have always had very few.

Most people have very little real exposure to what their friends do or think.

I suspect this is part of what has led to so many people forming a really weird mental map of the world.

Rather than learning by observing large groups of people in normal social interaction, perceptions are shaped by social media.

Which leads us to tell number two:

You're getting almost no private information from observing any of your peers.

"Actually all of my promiscuous friends use condoms when they have sex."

Almost guaranteed to be made up. Most people have no idea what their friends do.

Tell three: they are vague. If someone said "we were all talking at the tpot meet-up about condom use" that would be more believable.

"All of my friends prefer to masturbate with the lights off" is not.

Use stereotype accuracy as well: is the person you're speaking with the kind of person who would reasonably have that kind of experience.

Hobby is video games? They probably don't have experience with what the football team is doing.

And assortative selection for friend groups: whoever they do associate with is likely to be similar to them.

"All of the cops I know." Are they a cop? Then it's unlikely they know many at all.

A lot of the time these things will cluster together. The most implausible people with a personal experience that is totally incongruent with everything else about them.