Today I went to a talk about terrorism. After the talk, I asked a question: What’s the evidence for the recommendations you made at the end? The speaker, a professor at Harvard, began her answer by apologizing: I can only tell you case-by-case anecdotes, she said. She repeated this apology a little later. Well, of course no one has done a controlled experiment (or any experiment) on how to deal with terrorism. Of course all we have is a story here, a story there. The speaker, whose talk was good, had heard the pervasive dismissiveness I criticize here so many times that not only did she expect it, she accepted it. The academic Stockholm Syndrome.
No doubt the evidence can be improved, yes. But that is usually true.