There are 2000 footnotes referencing published studies.

It's not perfect, but hopefully there are enough different views all triangulating on "truth" to provide value.

The world is a complicated place and the truth is hard to find. Unintentional confirmation bias is a thing. Intentional (at some level) cherry-picking to support your preferred answer is a thing too. But that doesn't mean that nobody ever learns anything from looking at data.

If someone claims to be "evidence-based", then their intention should be given the benefit of the doubt. They may be affected by confirmation bias, but that doesn't mean their conclusions are wholly baseless. You should take a look and see how they're doing before dismissing them out of hand.

In other words, we hardly know anything

By assuming there's a "right" way to arrive at conclusions, people run the very dangerous risk of believing they've got the One True Answer, and everyone else are Wrong.

I think reality is a lot closer to the idea that there is no objective/rational way to decide what information is relevant and what information isn't, and we have to constantly adjust that dial in everything we think about and do.

There is an article about a group of people who have greatly reduced emotional capacity (not sociopaths, something more severe), and are therefore more or less rendered incapable of making decisions. It's a fascinating read, but I can't find it in my brief searches. Maybe someone else knows what I'm talking about?

Edit: I found the relevant anecdote! From an NPR interview https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101334... about a book called "How We Decide":

"And I think one of the best examples of this comes from the work of a neurologist named Antonio Demasio, who in the early 1980s was studying patients who, because of a brain tumor, lost the ability to experience their emotions. So they didn't feel the everyday feelings of fear and pleasure. And you'd think, if you were Plato, that these people would be philosopher-kings, that they would be perfectly rational creatures, they'd make the best set of decisions possible. And instead, what you find is that they are like me in the cereal aisle, that they're pathologically indecisive, that they would spend all day trying to figure out where to eat lunch.

They'd spend five hours choosing between a blue pen or a black pen or a red pen, that all these everyday decisions we take for granted, they couldn't make. And that's because they were missing these subtle, visceral signals that were telling them to just choose the black pen or to eat the tuna fish sandwich or whatever. And then when we're cut off from these emotional signals, the most basic decisions become all but impossible."

When the data presented to us suit our current view or agenda, we somehow feel that it's valid. I remember when discussions about "open plans" or "estimates" were still a thing, without fail "evidence based" works such as Peopleware or The Mythical Man Month would be mentioned.

If this book turned out to agree with the view that "scrum is not really more productive", or "less meetings means more productive", or "the interview process is broken", then we'd all be really glad to refer to its data.