I suggest that your Starbucks/Main Street example is a bad one, since these are rather specific details over which a given person's daily experience is likely to produce an accurate posterior distribution.

There's a confusion regarding the example, due to my writing, because I meant to argue that the map of Nashville would not be useful for navigating Memphis. My thesis (however buried) was that a person can use anecdotes (fabricated or not) to evaluate how compelling an idea is. By analogy with the locations of Starbucks in different cities, I don't buy the idea that faith in a map is more important than the information content of the map, even if it somehow played a role in lost soldiers navigating their way out of the mountains.

I nearly always counter-weight my thoughts with counter-arguments, which is the way my brain organizes information, but which makes my writing difficult to follow, I'll work on that. In the original comment of mine above, I spent some time on the idea that to some extent the information of a map is relevant in a distinct but similar context, as for example in my analogy cities have spatial patterns in common (and mountains will too). But that was just a distracting counterpoint...

So in the end I think we agree mostly. My thesis was that a person needs to be critical of the relevance of anecdotes.

Where we might disagree is in the significance of the size of the domain in real life where anecdotes are the best means we have of organizing, extracting and relaying information. For example,

a probability calculation describing the whole chain of propositions necessary for a fictional narrative to be true

is going to be more or less useless in the cases where we are most dependent on narratives. Narratives help us integrate thinking over a non-linear network of ideas developed over a lifetime of experience. If estimating probabilities over a linear chain of propositions is feasible, then its a different kind of problem, one more suited to analytic analysis.

Back to the object level, what was the problem/idea the authors were trying to express with their story about the soldiers? That 'perspective and attitude' matters (more than? sometimes just as much as? can compensate for lack of?) real knowledge about the territory. It's a pretty amorphic, fuzzy idea to begin with. I consider it a success they were able to capture the idea at all, but I wouldn't consider it worth actually quantifying..