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You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

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Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#81

Post by Retric »

refurb wrote: post #72
polyfractal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is utter hogwash. I'm as critical as anyone (probably more so, check my comment history) of academic biology because of my background in it. There are certainly things wrong it. And due to the nature of biology, replicating results is really hard . It's a fact of life when you deal with systems that are not perfect, not identical and very opaque. But to say that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics…

While I agree that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is going way overboard. I'm going to take the other side of the argument because I think you are way off base. I worked in both an academic lab and a "big pharma" lab(4 years and 6 years respectively). To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed…

The incentives are great on the first test. But, there is a lot of money to be made for tweaking the finial study from inconclusive to slightly positive.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#82

Post by bmelton »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #71

I had to vote this up because of the meta-nature of the article. If anybody makes a comment disagreeing with it while sharing an anecdote they only play into's the author's theme! It's like accusing somebody of being in denial: there's nothing they can say in return that doesn't somehow support the idea that they are in denial. Love it. Having said that, this is another really bad article in what seems like an endles…

Thank you. I was writing a large diatribe of my own, but refreshed in another window and saw yours echoing what I wanted to say, plus a lot that I wouldn't have thought of.

The one other thing that strikes me is that, for the sake of argument, I will often convert more dependable facts into anecdotal form to ease understanding. I've found, through trial and error, that just stating the hard facts tends to lead into a circle of explanation, but stating that same information in more relatable terms is, simply put, more relatable.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#83

Post by Goladus »

Contrarian anecdotes can be very useful (and logically sound) when they are contrary to a generalization. If someone asserts "f(x) = 5 for all x in A", "f(a) = 3 and a in A" is a logical contradiction proving the assertion false.

And, frankly, if we're talking about public discussion of scientific papers, inappropriate generalization is as big a problem as contrarian anecdotes, if not bigger. Scientific papers often cover highly specific observations that are useful primarily to other researchers, and often even then not for many years. People then try to apply that specific knowledge to practical day to day situations.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#84

Post by capnrefsmmat »

polyfractal wrote: post #66
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…

This is utter hogwash. I'm as critical as anyone (probably more so, check my comment history) of academic biology because of my background in it. There are certainly things wrong it. And due to the nature of biology, replicating results is really hard . It's a fact of life when you deal with systems that are not perfect, not identical and very opaque. But to say that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics…

Did you read the original article in Nature before devising your ad hominem?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

They certainly had access to the original data. To quote:

> To address these concerns, when findings could not be reproduced, an attempt was made to contact the original authors, discuss the discrepant findings, exchange reagents and repeat experiments under the authors' direction, occasionally even in the laboratory of the original investigator.

There are quite a few other studies which raise similar questions statistics about medical research; e.g.:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11600885 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n9/full/nn.2886.html http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435605... http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0b013e31818131e7

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#85

Post by hythloday »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #71

I had to vote this up because of the meta-nature of the article. If anybody makes a comment disagreeing with it while sharing an anecdote they only play into's the author's theme! It's like accusing somebody of being in denial: there's nothing they can say in return that doesn't somehow support the idea that they are in denial. Love it. Having said that, this is another really bad article in what seems like an endles…

I generally disagree with the OP and agree with your dissent, but do you not think that the OP could be more charitable read, not as "suppress certain kinds of replies", but as "don't exploit known cognitive biases, and punish people who seek to exploit them"? I'm quite comfortable downvoting naked appeals to emotion ("please won't someone think of the children?"), because I don't think they add anything, and are harmful to, the conversation. I think the OP is making a similar proposal for anecdotal contradiction. Both his examples are chosen well in this light: non-medical replies to a study that found a weak correlation. To me, the contradictions look more like a strawman: the argument they attack seems to be that coffee consumption will, in 100% of cases, cure Alzheimer's, a claim the study never made. I'm not sure we should privilege (or penalize) anecdotal contradiction on anything other than the merits of its argumentation, but in many cases I find that to be extremely weak.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#86

Post by scalable »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #65
derleth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> oh no! an anecdote! better close your mind now Another idiotic strawman argument.

Forgot whimsy doesn't play on HN - too many literal thinkers. Sorry, I'll refrain.

Jokes such as those are really bad for a good discussion. They serve to prove to people on your "side" (an idiotic notion, but I digress), how stupid the people on the other side are. I would downvote if I could.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

CookWithMe wrote: post #64

I'm all in when it comes to call bullshit on something. But because we (hackers) are used to boolean decisions, we are looking for counter-examples. But these are just non-arguments when the finding is "In 9 out of 10 cases, ...". The anecdote is the 1 out of 10 case. Let's try to question anything, and when it is suspicious - by all means, say so! But, I guess what the author is trying to say (beyond the whole Downv…

> But these are just non-arguments when the finding is "In 9 out of 10 cases, ...". The anecdote is the 1 out of 10 case.

The whole point of the article is that people won't judge that anecdote as only 0.1 relevant, but much much more (I'd say close to 0.9 if they personally prefer what anecdote says to what research says). It's a general human flaw that's very visible in day-to-day interactions with people.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#88

Post by scalable »

phren0logy wrote: post #44
bad_user wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

When you cannot control all the variables, it's important to have a large enough sample that the randomness in each direction for the different variables essentially cancels itself out. Also what does "the statistical significance of short-term studies is zero" mean? I don't think it means what you think it means. I would argue that short-term studies (for nutrition anyway) have little clinical significance, despite…

Not even a large sample will help against systematic errors.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#89

Post by polyfractal »

refurb wrote: post #72
polyfractal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is utter hogwash. I'm as critical as anyone (probably more so, check my comment history) of academic biology because of my background in it. There are certainly things wrong it. And due to the nature of biology, replicating results is really hard . It's a fact of life when you deal with systems that are not perfect, not identical and very opaque. But to say that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics…

While I agree that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is going way overboard. I'm going to take the other side of the argument because I think you are way off base. I worked in both an academic lab and a "big pharma" lab(4 years and 6 years respectively). To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed…

Fair points. My thoughts:

>To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed a paper we didn't have access to, it took a few hours to get it. The company was more than willing to pay the $50 to get a copy of whatever paper, since we would often blow $50 running one experiment.

I'll admit that my knowledge of big pharma journal access is colored by those in big pharma that I've talked to (anecdotal evidence, oh the irony). Perhaps they just had poor departments or bad access, I don't know.

However, every university that I've been at has instant access to journals. I never had to wait hours for a paper...we had free reign of just about every journal. Even at my relatively small and poor undergraduate institute.

>1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the work is use in a later project.

99% of projects in academia are building off some previous grad student or post-doc's work. Sure, there are projects which are nearly impossible to replicate (I should know, I spent 1.5 years of my life trying to replicate a previous grad's project). But it's equally laughable to say that data is never double-checked - professor's career is a long string of projects building on previous projects.

>2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in [industry]

I'll concede that there is often pressure to publish positive results in an academic setting. However, as you rightly mentioned, academics live and die by their papers. It just takes one lab refuting your paper to have a burned career. While I agree that many academics prefer to just ignore papers they can't recreate, there is still a lot riding on publishing replicable data.

>3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of experience.

This is a pretty baseless statement? I know plenty of techs working at big pharma that just graduated with an undergrad degree and have zero of wet-bench experience (just like I know of plenty who did the same in academia). Conversely, I can't even count the number of post-docs and senior scientists that work at various universities, with literally centuries of experience between them.

Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

D_Alex wrote: post #19

I 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…

You don't challenge "false, but widely held beliefs" with anecdotes - those beliefs actually is exactly what anecdote becomes when it starts being repeated.

Alerting people to new circumstances is a good use, but that's pretty much all. Proof by counterexample works well only in mathematical logic, which is not how the real world works[1]. In reality you enter the domain of probability theory, and there counterexamples work exactly as the article author says - as an evidence that needs to be properly weighted. And these are those weights that people vastly overestimate in case of anegdotes.

[1] - by this I mean, mathematical logic is not how we model, comprehend and operate reality.

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