Disappointment in all directions

Knowledge of somebody else's lived experience rarely comes across, for several reasons:

* The full story is usually very long.
* Individual pieces of the story usually do not sound very compelling in isolation (the story is not about any one event, it is about larger patterns of events).
* Especially when speaking to more scientifically-minded or engineering-minded people, there is a faint stigma associated with "anecdotal" evidence. In contexts where no other form of evidence can reasonably exist, there is a tendency to dismiss the entire subject matter as inherently subjective and meaningless.
* When cherished people or beliefs are challenged, there is a tendency to refuse to engage with the evidence, to rationalize it away, to repeatedly move the goalposts, or to otherwise engage in special pleading.
* The fundamental attribution error predisposes us to place greater weight on our own lived experiences than on somebody else's lived experiences, so where they differ, we tend to interpret that difference in favor of our own experiences.
* The various -isms (racism, sexism, etc.) have been with us for centuries, if not millenia, but for some reason, some engineering-minded people seem to think that you can solve these ancient problems with top-down magic words such as "meritocracy" and "consensus," rather than the hard work of self-reflection that would otherwise need to be done on an individual, bottom-up level. When presented with the option to do nothing and make it Somebody Else's Problem, there is a strong human tendency towards that option, so these people are far more persuasive than the evidence should allow.