>> Anecdotal stuff / vibes are actually really useful.
> You can just say you've already made up your mind despite not having personal experience, your anecdotes being biased, and having no statistically relevant evidence - and nothing will change your mind.
I absolutely can and do change my mind, lots of times. I'm not an old fart set in his ways. What I'm saying is that there is an overcorrection towards this "intellectual well" way of thinking. It's not that statistics is useless, it's that someone telling you of an issue based on vibes / personal experience, or from a single sample is useful even if editors would desk reject it.
It's as though people behave as the numbers in papers come from God instead of a study done with limitations by people who have agendas and make mistakes. It can be right, I love good papers, and despite what you might have concluded actually I love rigor, mathematics in particular is amazing, but when you also take the approach of rejecting any story or opinion because a stat said so (often ignoring how that stat may have been collected or data analysed), this is where problems happen.