Title: What is anecdotal empirical evidence? - Quora
Headings: What is anecdotal empirical evidence?
What is anecdotal empirical evidence?
Benjamin Golub
Frederick Dalpay
Quora User
Robert J. Kolker
Daniel Buttafuoco
Quora User
Martin Turner
Greg Olson
Toby Dillon
Quora User
Carol Willis
Andy Serrano

Content: Second, it has selection issues: whatever made it available or noticeable to the observer may be biasing the inferences we draw from it. In our example, red is a noticeable color, so unless you carefully documented all the ladies you saw, your generalization might be biased by that. [ 1]
Summing Up
The distinction between empirical knowledge and analytic knowledge is much more clear-cut than the distinction between anecdotal and non-anecdotal evidence. The empirical/analytic distinction feels like a wall: fairly absolute, and about as objective as you can get. It's also extremely fundamental. The conceptual distance between a mathematical theorem (analytic) and a table of physical observations (empirical) is as large as the distance between a quail egg and the notion of friendship. On the other hand, the difference between an anecdotal observation ("I tripped over my shoelaces and fell like this") and a data set (descriptions of all shoelace-related falls in the U.S. in 2007) is one of degree. At the extremes it's easy to tell them apart, but both dimensions that come up in the definition of "anecdotal" -- how much data there is, and how rigorously it was collected -- change more continuously, and depend on the observer's judgment.