Have their been stories with seemingly solid statistical data, where anecdotal evidence shows that the statistical evidence is wrong?
You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#52In 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…
This is a terrible perspective. I would argue that if even those research papers could not be replicated, an anecdote is all but worthless.
An anecdote, if true, is a contrary example which can be useful. It can even disprove an absolute claim - it only takes one counterexample. In mathematics this is done all the time.
Statistics are themselves misleading - there are whole books on the subject (oh no! an anecdote! better close your mind now). They are highly contextual, but the popular press excels are stripping that context and proclaiming absurd extremes. Anecdotes are excellent context, putting statistics into perspective.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a terrible perspective. I would argue that if even those research papers could not be replicated, an anecdote is all but worthless.
An anecdote, if true, is a contrary example which can be useful. It can even disprove an absolute claim - it only takes one counterexample. In mathematics this is done all the time. Statistics are themselves misleading - there are whole books on the subject (oh no! an anecdote! better close your mind now). They are highly contextual, but the popular press excels are stripping that context and proclaiming absurd extre…
> oh no! an anecdote! better close your mind now
Another idiotic strawman argument.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A vaccine is a virus in latent form Not exactly, it's not a virus in latent form, it's either a killed virus, a piece of a virus, or a different virus that is weak, but provokes the same reaction as the more important one. (Do you know what latent means? It means that it shows up later, which vaccines do not do.) > So yeah, personally I never take a vaccine that hasn't been in circulation for some time. Yah, me too…
On "latent" ... English is not my primary language and this was just a bad translation. Do you know anything about vaccines at all? I guess not, but I can't help to not get worried about the rise of autoimmune disorders and I haven't heard yet a plausible explanation for the phenomenon. Unless your logic is that the vaccine somehow changes the bodies response, which it doesn't. And how in the world would you know tha…
> but I can't help to not get worried about the rise of autoimmune disorders and I haven't heard yet a plausible explanation for the phenomenon.
The most plausible explanation is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis see also http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/disease-prone/2012/02/15...
> And how in the world would you know that?
How could it? If a vaccine could cause such a change so could any illness. A vaccine is just a piece of virus put where your body can notice it. Everything after that is entirely from the body.
For example rabies: Lethal right? But the body can actually clear the rabies virus with no trouble - almost. The trouble is that by the time the body gets rids of the virus it's too late.
So what do you do? You give the body the rabies virus ahead of time, and you do it in a way that prevents the person from actually getting sick. Then next time the body encounters rabies it's ready.
All vaccines work exactly this way: You let the person encounter the illness ahead of time. You make no change whatsoever in the person - all you are doing is making them slightly sick, but in a way that doesn't kill them.
Whatever change the vaccine causes, the illness also does - except the illness also causes damage as the virus replicates.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#55I totally get where the author is coming from, but I am not reeeally sure if that is good advice. Anecdotal evidence has its place, eg: proof by counterexample, challenging false, but widely held beliefs, or alerting people to new circumstances. A: "Murrumbidgee River is fun and safe for children to swim in! No one came to any harm there for the last 100 years!" B: "Dunno... my dog was eaten by a crocodile there last…
In your example, A is not relating a statistical or experimental finding, but instead dispensing commonsense knowledge which happens to be objectively false. It's not what the OP is talking about.
Commonsense, like ulcers are caused by diet and anxiety, or that salt raises blood pressure?
I think a good point is made: statistical evidence is also misleading - it deliberately ignores (averages out) the extreme cases. The results are a distribution; statistics folds that into one number. Anecdotes fill out the distribution.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#56Are people joking when they defend anecdotal stories with "once this anecdotal story proved to be true and the study was faulty"? The proposition that the article makes is not that anecdotal stories must be false, but that they might influence the reader more than they should. Thus they should not be encouraged.
Yeah, thanks for deciding how gullible I am, and please do sanitize what I get to read for my own good. That's how open dialog works, right?
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#57Are people joking when they defend anecdotal stories with "once this anecdotal story proved to be true and the study was faulty"? The proposition that the article makes is not that anecdotal stories must be false, but that they might influence the reader more than they should. Thus they should not be encouraged.
Yeah, thanks for deciding how gullible I am, and please do sanitize what I get to read for my own good. That's how open dialog works, right?
What do you think the voting system on HN does? It promotes good content, thus also demotes bad content. The author is saying "Here is a reason that content X is bad. If you agree with me, downvote it".
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#58By this logic, HN'ers should downvote any anecdote describing successfully exiting a startup because statistics show that the vast majority of startups fail and these anecdotes describing success unduly influence the thinking of entrepreneurs.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#59Well I think Stalin summed up the perils of totally ignoring anecdotes pretty well:
"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."
This topic sort of came up the other day in the thread about the girl losing the iPad software she needs to talk (Silencing Maya). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103344
Some commenters thought the story should be ignored as a data point about the societal value of patents. I disagree in that case because I don't believe economics or social sciences have anywhere near the amount of rigor and theory to make a good claim on whether the patent system is a net benefit to society. Deciding such a thing is a very old, and classic problem in philosophy. The OP seems to implicitly relying on a variant of utilitarianism, which IMO is wholefully inadequate to rely on for moral decisions.
Since science is so hard, there is a lot of bad science out there. What gets reported in the wider media has all sorts of weird selection bias, never mind what gets picked for publication in journals. Anecdotes are human stories and they are deeply connected to why we care. Statiscal tools can be used in ways that justify harm people in the name of greater good. I agree that scientific medicine provides tools for "real"'medicine that other methods don't. I just think we should remember to real peoples stories, especially if they are true. Anyone reading this probably gets that one can't exactly counter balance the effect of anecdotes within themselves. But it can still be countered some, I think it's worth it to hear stories (that are relaxant to the topic). Now what is the basis of my beliefs? Mostly intuition, not rationality. But I don't think it's possible to undermine my ideas with some kind of experimentally bases argument. There's just way to many variables!
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#60The simplification in the title is dangerous without a 'when' attached. Mindlessly downvoting contrarian anecdotes will lead to a hive-mind. Beware.
Opinions overwhelm all other forms of material in a discussion. Anecdotes are actually one up from opinions as they are concrete. You should weight them like so:
Statistical Evidence + Logic > Statistical Evidence > "Common Knowledge/Wisdom" > Anecdote + Logic > Anecdote > Opinion + Logic > Opinion