Scepcop, congratulations on a great little forum. As I'm a newbie here, and one that sits pretty comfortably on both sides of the fence, I think I'd like to take a poition on your 'test'. Even though this is such a long dead thread, it's the principle of the thing, and there's an issue I feel had been left unaddressed.
First, The lie under the circumstances was innappropriate, and destroys the credibility of the skeptic's evidence, leaving them to rely solely upon the raw structure of their argument. Whether you'd bother to continue to engage in debate with them after such a bizarre exchange is another question.
All that said, I disagree your notion that wide use of ebay feedback ratings prooves the validity of anecdotal evidence.
Ebay feedback ratings are certainly a reliable measure of sentiment, and I agree that they are fairly reliable (though I've only used ebay once, the principle seemed sound), but they are only a measure of sentiment based on user experience, not proof of any underlying cause for that sentiment. That is, feedback mechanisms reliably measure what they are deisgned to measure, but not much else.
Music charts are a great example, they tell you what music is popular, not which artist is the peak of musical prowess. Like Bieber
, a terrible blight upon our radios, but topping the charts nonetheless.
If I may steal a few examples from your article, you'll see where I'm going.
"For example, if someone told me that there was a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit at the local mall taking photos with kids, the odds are that if I went to the mall to verify it, it would check out most of the time (and if the Santa dressed man isn’t there at the time, he was there earlier at least)."It is indeed a safe bet that the anecdotal evidence was correct that there was a guy dressed as Santa, but this does not make the leap required to prove the existence of the real fairy tale version of Santa Claus. The same way a large group of people reporting David Copperfield can really fly does not make it so (no matter how much they believe it). The same way anecdotal reports of supernatural phenomenon do not prove that the phenomenon actually had a true supernatural origin. They do certainly prove *something* happened though.
"One argument I use that always gets these skeptics goes like this. I ask them about a country they’ve never been to before, such as France for example. And I state it like this: “Since you’ve never been to France before, and you have no real evidence that it exists other than anecdotes you heard, do you assume then that it doesn’t exist for now? After all, the photos, videos, and souvenirs from that country could all be forgeries, you just don’t know do you?” The skeptic will usually reply with “But I can fly to France and verify that it exists.” And that answer totally misses the point, so I then counter with the key question “Yeah but UNTIL you go to France, do you assume for NOW that it doesn’t exist, based on your skeptical philosophy that anecdotal evidence is invalid?” That stumps them EVERYTIME! They NEVER have a response to that one."I can directly observe the effect of France, and so indirectly infer its existence. I can compare the anecdotal evidence of news reports reflected in financial markets and political movements around the world. This occurs in much the same way as I observe the effect of gravity or magnetism, things that I can only observe indirectly, by their effect. On the other hand, I can very easily account for a materialist world without needing to account for some effect caused by the supernatural. There is no gap in material knowledge that requires I hypothesise the paranormal to fill.
In short, the absence of France would create a great big France shaped void I have to account for somehow, the absence of psi requires no such thing.
I do, however, choose to believe in psi because of the colour it lends to life, and because I think it's necessary to stay sane.
Another good example is in a link I stole shamelessly from the Fallacy Files:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/scien ... ref=sloginSuperstitious purchasing of insurance doesn't keep planes in the air... or does it?
Anyway, anecdotes are great for indicating sentiment, providing eyewitness collaboration, and as lead indicators for research, they are rather rubbish at describing the causes and mechanisms of phenomena.