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You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

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Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#31

Post by loup-vaillant »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #24
loup-vaillant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take an example, since they seem to work best: vaccines. Vaccines protect you from the risk of contracting particular diseases, some of which are crippling, lethal, or incurable. Plus, most are extremely effective: once you take your shots, you are effectively immune. That's good. There is a downside however. Sometimes, vaccines have side effects. Most side effects are quite benign, but if you're unlucky enough…

Are you actually arguing against giving anecdotes weight by using... anecdotes?

Yes, I'm evil.

Here is the "good" version: Bayesianism is correct. Those who don't believe me may want to read E. T. Jaynes[1] or Eliezer Yudkowsky[2] (long, and may feel abstract and dull). But countless studies about biases showed that we humans are poor at correctly assessing evidence at our disposal. Some of those studies showed that some failure modes come from anecdotes. Downvoting seems harsh, but it's the best we currently have to combat those failure modes.

Now we don't want to overdo it. I suggest we put a comment citing which reliable statistics contradict the downvoted anecdote. Maybe that'll help avoid groupthink. We may also want to allow people to just say they have anecdotal evidence to the contrary of whatever.

[1]: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf

[2]: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#32

Post by loup-vaillant »

the_bear wrote: post #29
loup-vaillant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take an example, since they seem to work best: vaccines. Vaccines protect you from the risk of contracting particular diseases, some of which are crippling, lethal, or incurable. Plus, most are extremely effective: once you take your shots, you are effectively immune. That's good. There is a downside however. Sometimes, vaccines have side effects. Most side effects are quite benign, but if you're unlucky enough…

So you're suggesting that because some people are bad at weighing information, anything based on personal experience should be downvoted? Successful entrepreneurs should no longer give advice? Programmers shouldn't weigh in on programming issues unless they're citing third-party research? Marketers can't suggest tips for how to promote a startup because it's possible their methods aren't universally successful?

It's just not some people. It's everyone. Including you, me, and those who know about the various failure modes.

And please don't straw man me. Personal experience is mostly great. Successful entrepreneurs may have better decision making processes, not just more luck. Programming issues should be weighted on, since there are so little reliable studies here, and the field is so young. Etc. I was just talking about the cases when the evidence that contradicts the anecdote is solid and definite.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#33

Post by loup-vaillant »

archangel_one wrote: post #30
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually arguing against giving anecdotes weight by using... anecdotes?

Those are examples, not anecdotes.

Yes, but I did make use of strong emotional story-like elements to make my point.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#34

Post by keithpeter »

"But in the presence of statistical evidence, don’t tolerate contrarian anecdotes, and don’t make them yourself, knowing the exaggerated impact they can have."

When you start to design a statistical experiment, you have already made an important methodological choice. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_Theory

I've noticed that in my own field which is education, there appears to be a fondness for sophisticated statistics, even though no manager ever allocated students to teachers on a double blind random basis. An excellent example is the way the UK Education ministry has decided that 'phonics' is the way to teach reading.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18462214

I think that this general tendency might be an example the 'white coat syndrome' in action; belief that using formal statistical techniques might increase the meaningfulness of the results. I suppose that is a form of cargo cult.

This is hacker news, a forum aimed at people with novel business proposals and new software to try out. Should you be trying to find 'the Truth' or should you be building some grounded theory that tells you what to do next, provisionally, now, today?

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#36

Post by Peaker »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #28

In a world were 47 of 53 landmark cancer research papers were found to not be replicable... where one scientist admitted (after the meta-researchers tried 50 times to replicate the result and failed) that they had run the experiment 6 times and got the result once and reported that because it made a better "story"... where the act of suppressing refutations of other's bogus research is "culturally commonplace"... Som…

Surely you could find some scientists or scientific institutions you can trust?

Or maybe you can trust those experiments that do get replicated successfully?

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#37

Post by bad_user »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #28

In a world were 47 of 53 landmark cancer research papers were found to not be replicable... where one scientist admitted (after the meta-researchers tried 50 times to replicate the result and failed) that they had run the experiment 6 times and got the result once and reported that because it made a better "story"... where the act of suppressing refutations of other's bogus research is "culturally commonplace"... Som…

The problem with much of modern medicine is that much of it is based on flawed and biased statistical studies. Whether this is done because medical personnel don't have training in statistics, or because such studies generate funding, I don't know, but something is definitely rotten.

Let's take anything involving nutrition. Some challenges are: (1) people lie, (2) such studies can't be double-blind so placebo kicks in, (3) the statistical significance of short-term studies is zero, (4) you can't control all the variables, unless you lock those people in a cage and (5) most conclusions of such studies have the potential to confuse the cause and the effect.

But not all of science is like that. Just medicine.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#39

Post by JohnHaugeland »

Peaker wrote: post #36
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #28

In a world were 47 of 53 landmark cancer research papers were found to not be replicable... where one scientist admitted (after the meta-researchers tried 50 times to replicate the result and failed) that they had run the experiment 6 times and got the result once and reported that because it made a better "story"... where the act of suppressing refutations of other's bogus research is "culturally commonplace"... Som…

Surely you could find some scientists or scientific institutions you can trust? Or maybe you can trust those experiments that do get replicated successfully?

Given that the context is "downvote anything that Reddit or HN disagree with," it seems that the point is "don't follow flocks while voting; make your own decisions or don't vote."

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#40

Post by bad_user »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #23
Udo wrote: post #13

No. Contrarian anecdotes are good. They may turn out to be without merit, but then again so may the article itself. Having a real discussion is a good thing. Also, I would like to propose a logarithmic scale for weighting such things. Say, if the article in question found something extraordinarily significant with 100 out of 100 samples resulting in A, then it's still not rational to weigh a contrarian viewpoint resu…

Let's take an example, since they seem to work best: vaccines. Vaccines protect you from the risk of contracting particular diseases, some of which are crippling, lethal, or incurable. Plus, most are extremely effective: once you take your shots, you are effectively immune. That's good. There is a downside however. Sometimes, vaccines have side effects. Most side effects are quite benign, but if you're unlucky enough…

A vaccine is a virus in latent form, forcing your B-cells to produce antibodies for it. So yeah, personally I never take a vaccine that hasn't been in circulation for some time.

Also, considering that medicine is at the stage of alchemy and that doctors simply have no idea what long-term effects these vaccines have on our immune system, some questions do have to be asked.

Like, isn't it possible that with the prevalence of vaccines, our own capacity for generating antibodies gets affected?

And remember here that an exaggerated response of the immune system may be even worse than a lazier response. Such an exaggerated response may even kill you (e.g. Influenza). So either way, the long-term effects of over-reliance of vaccines may be quite bad.

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