In social sciences, yes. But such body of knowledge is careful to examine such testimony to remove human bias. Just because a thousand people testify to what they claim to be a miracle doesn't necessarily mean it was a miracle.
Bad science tends to get filtered out over time, even when publishers take shortcuts. Bad science gets scrutinized and exposed as fraud. It's true, science publication seems overly concerned with competition which makes the science suffer, but peer review ultimately weeds it out.
However, that's not an issue of anecdotal evidence being unreliable. That's an issue of pharmaceutical companies choosing to place profit motives above consumer safety. They're not putting patients at risk because they believed what they were told, they're putting patients at risk because the payoff is greater than the risk.
The peer review process there is broken for completely separate reasons, though. It's not relevant to the topic of anecdotal evidence. It's not a failure of the scientific method, it's a failure of corporate regulation.
In social sciences, yes. But such body of knowledge is careful to examine such testimony to remove human bias. Just because a thousand people testify to what they claim to be a miracle doesn't necessarily mean it was a miracle.
Bad science tends to get filtered out over time, even when publishers take shortcuts. Bad science gets scrutinized and exposed as fraud. It's true, science publication seems overly concerned with competition which makes the science suffer, but peer review ultimately weeds it out.
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