alt Hacker News> If you keep hearing anecdotes at what point is it statistically important ?
Fair question but one has to keep in mind about ALL the other situations we do NOT hear about, namely all the failed attempts that did take time from professionals. It doesn't the successful attempts are not justified, solely that a LOT of positive anecdotes might give the wrong impressions that they are not radically most negative ones that are simply not shared. It's hard to draw conclusions either way without both.
I hear about people winning the lottery all the time. There were two $100m+ winners just this week. The anecdotes just keep piling up! That doesn't mean the lottery is a valid investment tool. People just do not understand how statistically insignificant anecdotes are in a sufficiently large dataset. Just for the US population, a 1 in a million chance of something happening to a person should happen enough to be reported on a new person every weekday of the year.