Please refrain from making these anecdotal observations.
Your observation is the equivalent of this from the movie "Get Him To The Greek":
"British mother fu##ers don’t die. You ever heard of a British rock and roll star dying? No. They don’t die. Mick Jagger. Keith Richard. Those Led Zeppelin. Themmotherfu##ers old as fuck! Fu##ing Ozzy Osbourne is gonna outlive Miley Cyrus"
I mentioned that it's an anecdote in the first sentence and it's something based on my own experience with the life of a close family member, not some myth I heard about from others.
It's also in the context of the comment I replied to, which also contains conclusions based on personal experience. And when speaking about nutrition these days, most known facts are based on flawed studies or anecdotes.
And HN itself is filled with anecdotes. It's actually in this community's culture to talk in anecdotes.
Please refrain from playing "know-it-all" every time someone writes an anecdote
Also what is mentioned has been observed multiple times in several countries.
"Anecdote is not data waa waa waa" or in your example, " No. They don’t die. Mick Jagger. Keith Richard" it certainly does not condone drug usage, but it certainly shows there are exception to "drugs are bad and you will die early" (especially given the amount consumed)
But please let us know if eggs are good or bad for people this week.
An informed observer would supplant his anecdote with a smidgen of studied data.
My-grandfather-lived-to-be-99-and-hes-from-swine-country is spectacularly useless.
Make an effort. Add detail.
We are not demanding khi-square tests just some detail.
Race, Geography, Family history, Rigor of vocation, Illnesses, Special abilities etc.
No amount of detail will approach the rigor of a proper study.
But make an effort.
I agree that we should all rely more on actual facts and studies and that we tend to perpetuate myths heard from a friend of a friend, which is just bad, especially for us since we should think like scientists. However it is not our job to do studies on nutrition and the available studies on nutrition are either biased or not conclusive of anything - listening to your gut feeling about what is right is actually the better path to take at this point in time.
Also, I could have added details, such as race (Caucasian), geography (Europe, temperate climate, hills), family history (war veterans, poverty after communism came, rough life), etc... but I usually don't because these are personal details and I like my privacy on the Internet, even though you could probably find plenty about me or my family if you wanted to, but that doesn't mean I have to make that info easy to find.
You also misunderstood me. I actually think that genetics, lifestyle, local culture are all factors that play a role, so I don't disagree with you. I also haven't said that my grandfather's diet would be healthy for everybody, I only said that it was healthy for him personally, so you have to be careful about making generalizations based on limited data and biases.
How about you just point out that it the story is anecdotal? There's not any call for telling anyone to "please refrain" from their comments if they aren't abusive.
For the record, I'm not crash hot about this anonymous anecdotal evidence either. I think that eating unhealthily is bad no matter whether you are on a farm or not. But to tell someone to be quiet? That's a losing argument - refute it, don't silence anyone.
Just... no. You're presenting "anecdotal" as if to contrast it with something like "established pattern." But "anecdotal" just means that something is a remembered story, nothing else.
So, there is something which we do called "observation." This is when we want to know the truth of something, so we set up some sort of meaningful experiment which we can do in the world, and find out. We go out and observe.
The reason that an anecdote is not an observation is because it comes to you first. That is, you already know the result of the anecdote before you select the data; it is something you "remember" when you hear about a new situation. This invokes all kinds of biases about how you remember, because you tend to remember anomalies -- and you tend to misremember their content. In anecdotes there is no "control group" and there isn't even a hope for a control; it's all been selected out anyway.
In this respect a single observation is not anecdotal, because they come from separate places. If a doctor puts a flow-meter in an artery after a bypass surgery to see if there is blood flowing at a normal cardiac rate, that is not an "anecdote", that is an "observation." It is not based on some sort of human reckoning; "I've done many bypass surgeries and I once saw an artery which looked just like that and was not, in fact, obstructed," but rather it's something reliable: at this time, a normal amount of blood was flowing through this artery.
