Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Summer Wine]

I read a number of posts where they demand a link. It seems that living in the country and having a number of friends with similar experiences isn't enough to justify information. It seems that educated people with practical experience can't analyse a situation and make an analysis without a link.

Therefore, is Daves a link? If I read a topic and agree with the situation and read a number of others who have experienced the same then can I link Daves as a source?

When can we justify our experiences as real?

Do we need to write them up in a book and have critics who have never lived or experienced life as we have make the decesion that it is correct before it is considered as real?

For my part, I lived a situation and had parents live a situation for over 20 years in a country that was descredited in my university by a book that was written by a proffesor who had spent a maximum of 2 weeks in the country of his research and the same one my folks lived in.

Therefore, linkage in my mind has little relevance unless backed by experience, (but I am probably wrong as some one I know is saying right now), so is the experience of others on this forum a link? Later can I use Daves as a link?

[kermo]

It depends. I don't demand citations and footnotes when I'm talking to someone face-to-face, but in that situation I know a bit more about who I'm talking to and I can see their expression. Also, it takes a bit more effort to scurry off and dig that article out of the magazine you read at the dentist's office.

When you're having a discussion online, the other person could be naked/drunk/crazy/joking/all of the above, and there's no way to tell at a glance. Also, it's relatively easy to back up a claim to a news article or a photo.

Anecdotes are hearsay. Opinions are not facts. Experiences are very subjective (for instance, have you read the debates on domestic violence around here? Some people claim to see it every day while others deny its prevalence.) Hence, I don't think Dave's is a link. People around here demand more hard evidence because they have no idea who they're talking to most of the time (some are professors, some are liars and drunks, some are both,) and the proof/data is easy enough to procure.

Simply providing a link, however, doesn't mean the debate is over. The source should be examined just as critically as the claim.

[Summer Wine]

Quote:

The source should be examined just as critically as the claim.

[kermo]

[The Bobster]

Usually when someone asks for a link it's in a discussion over some issue and a statement is made as fact which is to one end or the other of the spectrum of what is taken for granted or commonly believed. An example would be if I made a claim that Al Gore once voted against and spoke out saying that there wasn't much evidence that humans were having any effect on the environment - this runs contrary to what know about him for much of his career, and if he ever did say anything like that we'd ask for a supporting link in order to ascertain whether something in the context of the situation would explain why it's so surprising.

I think the OP is asking whether anecdotal evidence is worthless or not, and the answer is, um, sort of but I like it anyway.

Generally, I think people who already agree with you about most of what you are saying will possibly be swayed over the rest of the way, while those who simply do not agree are likely to view a story about "something that happened to me" with a jaundiced or skeptical eye - and maybe they should. After all, you could have made it up out of whole cloth for the amusement of a few moments, or you may have misinterpreted whatever it was you saw or experienced.

Perspective IS important, but being in the middle of a tornado is not the best place to stand to see the whole shebang, of course.

Personal experiences make for good reading, but it might help to bring a little bit more than that to the table. For instance, I recall once being in an argument about whether the attacks on 9/11 would have been so devastating if they had not been televised live, and someone disputed my claim that more Koreans died in the Gwangju Massacre than died in the Twin Towers. We went back and forth showing different figures here and there offered by various historians, and my opponent accused me of fabricating numbers. Finally I had to reach into my photo file of a trip to the Memorial there several years ago and post a shot I took of the wall of names - even the small segment that showed indicated more than the official numbers for the NYC disaster. But many of these deaths occured in secret and under a strict censorship that means that most Koreans would not find out about the heinousness until years later ...

Anyway, I like a good story, and if it's told well it's likely to convince me even more than a picture would, though I'm not sure it OUGHT to. Statistics bore me, and a lot of the time they are not much more than complex means to create prevarications - used to work in opinion polling, so I know very well how much the way a question is asked determines the kinds of results we end up with. Anecdotal evidence becomes impoertant when tghere are LOT of similar (even if unlikely-sounding) stories around a particular thing.

Links are useful when you want to get across something most peoiple didn't know before, or believed erroneously. I often find myself grateful when someone shows me I was wrong about something.

The ones I really hate are when someone just posts a link and the statement, "This guy explains it in 25 pages much better than I ever could." Oy vey, just a small paragraph to give us a clue what you are ON about ... okay?

[cbclark4]

[spliff]

[dogshed]

I think the word you're looking for is epistemology.

The definition they gave me in college is "how we know what we know".

Some people think that providing a source means something is true.
It only gives you a hint of where to start looking.

[Summer Wine]

[Hanson]