That's not all bad. Research findings generally aren't as conclusive as they seem to be, or as people take them to be. And the conclusions that people extrapolate from research findings tend to be unjustified generalizations.

But in the presence of statistical evidence, don’t tolerate contrarian anecdotes,

As the years have gone by, the more I've learned of statistics and probability, the less I've been impressed with statistical tests, and found that they, and unjustified conclusions from them, have a greater influence with some than they logically deserve. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The medical example he uses is a prime one. Treatment T consisting of some dosage schedule D of medicine M on some sample of users with symptom complex C fails to reject the null hypothesis for statistic S over the sample. Therefore it's a poor decision to try to use medicine M to cure your C.

Just not justified, in so so many ways, and yet you'll hear it all the time. From my experience, I don't think too many at Less Wrong need encouragement to discount anecdotes, but a fair number should be encouraged to trust less the conclusions extrapolated from people with tables of numbers and some equations.