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.

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.

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.