You shouldn't downvote to censor relevant information, period. You should only downvote if the material violates site guidelines. Downvoting to disagree is lazy, substituting easy censorship for thoughtful response. Instead, post your counter-argument or upvote an existing opinion that already expresses your position.
You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
91–100 of 158 posts
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prevale…
>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. What the hell are you talking about? There is probably no single more life-saving intervention in medicine than vaccines. It is true that a small number of people have a bad reaction to them, but more people have a bad rea…
If some people have bad, even fatal, reactions to vaccines shouldn't the physicians first duty (do no harm) mean that they should separate the people who would suffer sideffects from those who wouldn't?
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To address your points:
1. The big pharma guys have instant access to journals. When I say we had to wait a couple hours, it was because I was looking for a paper from "The Russian Journal of Chemistry" from 1912. We had a vendor who could track down anything. For any of the big journals, we had the same access as academia.
2. We agree on this point. If a lab experiment is used in a later project, it HAS to work or else the future work can't occur. However, lots of projects have "arms", where the experiment is an interesting observation that is never pursued. These are often "one-off" experiments that are published, but never repeated in the same lab.
3. I am by no means painting academics with a broad brush here. I think most academic research is done on the up-and-up and the results are valid, if not hard to replicate (this is research!). I think one issue is the one pointed out in the parent comment. You run 5 reactions, two fail and the three that work produce yields of 50%, 70% and 80%. What gets published? 80%. The devil is in the details. In big pharma, you are trying to make a drug and the science better work or else you can't bring it to market. Much higher standards for reproducibility.
4. I guess my thought here is based on the fact that big pharma typically hires from academic labs. All those post-docs and senior scientists with years of experience? That's who big pharma hires. So overall, I would imagine that the level of experience in big pharma is greater than the average you would see in academia (which makes sense since academia is training for working in places like big pharma).
Once again, I always shy away from descriptions that put all "big pharma" or "academic" researchers into one pile. There are brilliant people on both sides and crappy people on both sides.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#94I 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'm not carrying water for the original poster.
"There is no universal truth"? Are you sure? Because if that's true then there is no standard to judge whether one model is "higher-fidelity" and in fact there is nothing for science to do at all. Do you really believe that?
Do you really need to give up the idea that anything is actually true in order to dispute this blog post?
I don't understand how you figure that there is a choice between distrusting science and knowledge and silencing dissent. You seem to think that science and knowledge are just some form of political orthodoxy.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. What the hell are you talking about? There is probably no single more life-saving intervention in medicine than vaccines. It is true that a small number of people have a bad reaction to them, but more people have a bad rea…
If some people have bad, even fatal, reactions to vaccines shouldn't the physicians first duty (do no harm) mean that they should separate the people who would suffer sideffects from those who wouldn't?
No, not if 1 in 10000 people suffers that reaction, while there are equally negative consequences for 2 or more of those 1000 people if they don't get the vaccine and there is no known way to detect who will have the bad reaction.
And the ratio is much worse for actual vaccinations. You don't want to see what not vaccinating kids against polio results in...
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption is only that the article is based on a scientific study, not that it is omniscient.
A study that rigidly follows the scientific principles, but is intellectually dishonest (ie, sponsored by interested party of studied subject, etc) is often not useful to the reader of the study results. Because you can follow the letter of the principles, and still flout the spirit. One should, when listening to a study, question the funding. Likewise, dissenting opinions must also be examined in what interested par…
Sponsorship does not imply intellectual dishonesty. Intellectual dishonesty is a matter of how the argument is made. Sponsorship is a heuristic you could use to quickly filter papers but used as a counter-argument, it is simply ad hominem.
You are describing a method for judging arguments without thinking critically about the arguments themselves or examining their basis in evidence and that is not any kind of science. One does not find any measure of objectivity by averaging between opinions, only by holding arguments to the yardstick of rationality and evidence.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#97I 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 har…
But how do you distinguish between people who simply share their stories because they think it's moderately relevant to the thread, on the one hand, and people who "exploit known cognitive biases", on the other? Exploitation seems to imply deliberate manipulation, which most people who share medical anecdotes don't intend at all. Yet, humans have so many cognitive biases that even the most mundane thing can trigger one or another bias.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#98The author didn't pick good examples of contrarian anecdotes found on HN. They are contrary to a study on coffee consumption and dementia. The study, however, is only a sample of 124 people from Tampa and Miami. The study is just as likely to have found an isolated effect as the posters with family members who consumed a lot of coffee and still developed alzheimers. You would be better served by this: https://sites.g…
N=124 can definitely give statistically significant results. Consider the following thought experiment. You have a coin that you think might be loaded. You flip it 124 times. You get 119 tails. It is probably loaded.
Lets say you get 66 tails. Could definitely be due to chance.
Moral: The larger effect you study, the less sample size you can get away with.
It might be that people from Tampa and Miami are different in some important way from other people. However, if you want to level this criticism, maybe you should give a reason for suspecting this?
"The study is just as likely to have found an isolated effect as the posters with family members who consumed a lot of coffee and still developed alzheimers."
No, no, triple no.
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#99Well 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…
I don't understand the part about Stalin's advice. What was Stalin saying would happen if you ignored anecdotes? How do you figure he was talking about the value of anecdotes?
Re: You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
#100Earlier 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?
Those are hypotheticals or thought experiments, not anecdotes... they would be anecdotes if they were claimed to have actually happened.
I'm not arguing against anecdotes, but there is an important distinction there