If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
But to go beyond that, we really need something closer to “uniform quantified data” (though there is a place for intermediate quality data, like case reports). Personal experience is subject to confirmation bias; much more importantly, any single human has only met a tiny sliver of the human population, most of them in one or two sub-cultures, and most of them in specific circumstances that covers only a tiny part of the full life of the persons met. Quantified data is really at a whole higher level of quality; it starts making judgements about the whole population, judgements we couldn’t get in any other way.
it increases the already substantial evidential burden levied on any challenge to the official narrative of how people should be
I agree that there should be a substantial evidential burden for a new theory of human interactions; but there should also be a substantial evidential burden for “official narratives” as well. I find Zvi’s thesis (that these kind of “evil like attracts like” are very prevalent) plausible but unproven. I find the opposite thesis (that these behaviour are pretty rare) also plausible but unproven. Sometimes, we just don’t have enough evidence… yet.
One thing we can do is take a narrative, and deduce from it something that is measurable, and measure that. That isn’t proof or disproof by any means, but it’s useful evidence (of course, the order of operations matters: we need to deduce something that wasn’t directly used in forming the narrative in the first place).
If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.
If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
But to go beyond that, we really need something closer to “uniform quantified data” (though there is a place for intermediate quality data, like case reports). Personal experience is subject to confirmation bias; much more importantly, any single human has only met a tiny sliver of the human population, most of them in one or two sub-cultures, and most of them in specific circumstances that covers only a tiny part of the full life of the persons met. Quantified data is really at a whole higher level of quality; it starts making judgements about the whole population, judgements we couldn’t get in any other way.
I agree that there should be a substantial evidential burden for a new theory of human interactions; but there should also be a substantial evidential burden for “official narratives” as well. I find Zvi’s thesis (that these kind of “evil like attracts like” are very prevalent) plausible but unproven. I find the opposite thesis (that these behaviour are pretty rare) also plausible but unproven. Sometimes, we just don’t have enough evidence… yet.
One thing we can do is take a narrative, and deduce from it something that is measurable, and measure that. That isn’t proof or disproof by any means, but it’s useful evidence (of course, the order of operations matters: we need to deduce something that wasn’t directly used in forming the narrative in the first place).
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.