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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Because generally anecdotes aren’t sufficient evidence to draw society-wide conclusions from. For example in the United States there are more than 300,000,000 people. In a population that large there are bound to be many individual experiences that don’t extend to the whole.

Consider it this way. Each year a handful of people are struck by lightning. If you asked them what some of the most pressing dangers in the US are based on their personal “lived experience,” you’d likely get an answer that isn’t representative of the population at large.

If you asked someone to answer you, based on their individual experience and perception, whether the Earth was flat or round, you’d likely get a wrong answer.

If you elevate claims of individuals based on their experiences to the level of every other form of evidence or argument like statistics and investigation, you’d end up equating poltergeist hauntings, angelic visitations, and alien abductions to the same level of social importance as auto fatalities, heart attacks, and violent crime.

Social policy and arguments about social policy aren’t meant to be directly responsive to individual experiences in isolation. Society doesn’t have the resources to do that in every case, nor does everyone in society even share the experiences of a given individual such that responding to their experience would even be helpful.

If someone’s own subjective experience is the sum total of their evidence for something, it’s perfectly fair to say they haven’t proved their case. Failing all else, if individual experience is evidence, then anyone else’s contrary individual experience offsets anyone else’s and then no one ever proves anything.