PT142 · S4 · Q9 People are usually interested in

Since people aren't paying attention to statistical information, we don't really care what it does. We want to know how these people have fairly accurate beliefs about society, given that they're not using statistical information.

We're trying to explain how people tend to have fairly accurate beliefs. Anecdotes aren't going to provide them with accurate beliefs, since anecdotes tend to be misleading cases. This answer is talking about the prospect of anecdotes changing our beliefs, but since anecdotes are misleading cases, they would change our beliefs in inaccurate ways. So this is going in the opposite direction of anything that helps us.

It sounds like if someone were to illustrate statistical information with an apt anecdote, that would be ideal. We'd get the accuracy of the statistical information with the compelling interest of the anecdote. People could learn accurate stats via their favorite thing, anecdotes. But ... it doesn't sound like this happens too much. After all, we know that people rarely pay attention to statistical information. So given that people aren't paying attention to stats, but are paying attention to generally misleading anecdotes, how do they still have fairly accurate beliefs?

We're trying to explain how people have accurate beliefs about society. This says that people base their beliefs about other people on their emotional response to those people. Do we care what people believe of about other people? No, we're trying to deal with whether people have fairly accurate beliefs about society. Moreover, there's no common sense link between "basing beliefs on your emotional response" and "tending to have accurate beliefs".