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OrphanWilde comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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General note: let's not do that thing where we don't like an argument someone is presenting and so we fail to update on the evidence they present in favor of it.
The argument colors the evidence. If the argument is presented in such a way as to render it likely that confirmation bias is in play, or worse presented in such a way as to render it likely that opposing evidence was deliberately omitted, the evidence loses substantial value.
For example, I've seen some really good evidence that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged. However, the context rendered the evidence completely meaningless; the presenters also subscribed to all sorts of other conspiracy theories, presenting evidence which had long-since been debunked. It's a near-certainty that the presentation of the Sandy Hook evidence omitted anything which conflicted with the story presented, making the evidence appear artificially strong.
— EY, "What Evidence Filtered Evidence?"
Also, we should distinguish between experiential evidence that a person offers based on their own experience, and (what we might call) hermeneutic evidence that may depend on a particular selective evaluation of published records. The sort of "evidence" that conspiracy-theorists (Holocaust-deniers; 9/11-truthers, birthers, etc.) have to offer is usually of the latter kind. In the present case, we are dealing with people's reports of their own experiences; even if we do not agree with the sociopolitical conclusions they draw from their experiences, this is not reason for us to become denialists about their experiences themselves.
I have no disagreement; if I intended to say the authors involved were being dishonest, I would make that point, rather than implying it (my apologies if this comes across as defensive, but I find the idea highly... distasteful, to put it mildly). I simply object to Qiaochu_Yuan's unqualified statement; I don't think it is necessarily good advice in the general case when unqualified by caution about the motivations of those presenting the evidence.
Descriptions of their own experience are still filtered since it's impossible to describe everything one experiences. Furthermore, whose experiences get presented has definitely been filtered.
Also compare the current thread with this one: both threads involve someone presenting his/her personal experience about how bad things are and generalizing to similar cases, but one has several threads suggesting the presenter is lying, the other has several threads talking about how bad it is to question someone's personal experience.
Agreed. While memory can be unreliable, people don't normally go all hermeneutic with this kind of thing. Plus it's recognizable and nobody is doing it here.