Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

But it isn't. The null hypothesis requires us to assume that there's nothing but chance at work, and let evidence force a different conclusion. The fact that A and B appear correlated is not by itself evidence of anything other than chance.

> I'm well aware that "A is correlated to B" does not prove "A causes B" or even "A causes B or B causes A", but it is a data point in favor.

No, this is false. Without testing a hypothesis, and without a careful examination of a mechanism, the correlation has precisely no meaning apart from chance.

Here's an example selected at random from a vast literature that tries to make this point:

http://boingboing.net/2010/12/20/creating-a-phony-hea.html

Title: "Creating a phony health scare with the power of statistical correlation"

Quote: "In the United Kingdom, the more mobile phone towers a county has, the more babies are born there every year. In fact, for every extra cell phone tower beyond the average number, a county will see 17.6 more babies. Is this evidence that cell phone signals have some nefarious baby-making effect on the human body? Nope. Instead, it's a simple example of why correlation and causation should never be mistaken for the same thing."

I could link to a thousand similar stories, many being mistaken for actual scientific results.

> But the realist shouldn't underrate it either.

A realist -- a scientist -- always begins by assuming the association is the result of chance (the null hypothesis), and then examines evidence that might argue for another explanation. This is why all self-respecting scientific papers include a p-value. The p-value describes the probability that the result arose from chance, not the hypothesis under test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

Quote: "In statistical significance testing the p-value is the probability of obtaining a test statistic at least as extreme as the one that was actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true."

Translated into layman's language, the p-factor is the probability that the observation -- the "correlation" -- arose by chance.

A properly educated scientist always assumes the null hypothesis is true, i.e. that the observation arose from chance factors. She then tests this assumption with evidence.

My opinion.

Informed by a few things: some 40-odd years living on this planet (and possibly others), much of it involved directly or indirectly with technology and complexity. A general observation that much of the H/N crowd is younger (20s), often with the heightened sense of self-confidence which comes from youth, (often) a privileged upbringing, and a lack of exposure to hard knocks, as well as an overdeveloped faith in technological solutions.

A recent exploration of complexity specifically (see Joseph Tainter) and its dynamics. People don't choose complexity where it's not necessary, where they do, it's because it solves problems, but in doing so it imposes a tax -- higher resource (and especially energy) requirements, as well as decreased resilience and increased brittleness.

You do nothing by replying with a statement of the logical fallacy.

I disagree. You point out to others that the writer is relying on invalid arguments and/or facts. This may be out of laziness, out of a warped worldview, or out of deliberate manipulation of data and/or opinion (something I've been noticing increasingly on H/N). I'm content to observe the fallacy and move on. Sometimes the author (or someone else) will respond, occasionally copping to the error (in which case: success, a conversation ensues and the conversation moves forward), fairly frequently not and digging themselves in deeper (success: you've uncovered someone who's generally not worth arguing with, at this point I may simply drop the thread, or reply noting that they're repeating their earlier error).

I've actually made some interesting progress in understanding a few areas I'd previously had challenges with, in particular Libertarianism and the whole von Mises school, largely by discovering through conversations (and ensuing research) that the whole concept is based on a rejection of empiricism or real-world relevance. That and a healthy dose of corporate / plutocratic psychopathy courtesy the Koch brothers and others. Which explains much. And I rarely enter into discussions with those types other than to point out their irrationality.

this "you deserve to be called on it" attitude is that of a passive aggressive vigilantly.

Again, I disagree, and on this particular point, rather strongly.

Mind, yes, people will be wrong on teh Intarnets: http://xkcd.com/386/

But: we, humans, as a species, are facing some immense challenges. Global warming, peak oil, population, food, other resource exhaustion ("peak everything"), and a whole host of others.

And our institutions are exceptionally unfit to the challenge. Politics, economics, religion, technology, philosophy, the press, educational systems, liberal democratic principles (civil and human rights, etc.), even our own physiology and psychology (risk management, dopamine response, short-term/long-term focus), and a host of other factors are utterly maladaptive to what we're going to face over the next years, decades, assuming we survive that long, few centuries.

I'm not even pretending to have a clear view of what we need to do, or even all of what we face, but calling it "tremendously disruptive" is a mass understatement -- what else would you call a 7 to 14-fold (and possibly more) reduction in human population over a few decades at best? If HBS survives, you can bet they'll be teaching this one in 500 years.

So, yeah, I kinda take this shit a little bit seriously. And calling people on bullshit is part of that.

Even if the future of civilization isn't at stake, I've seen tremendous harm and pain come from sloppy and wishful thinking. But odds are quite good the stakes are slightly higher than that.

As Bettridge himself said:

> they know that story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it

Identifying a headline & story as an example of Bettridge's Law of Headlines should highlight that the headline is nasty link-bait phrased as a question purely to manipulate the reader and that the article provides no insight – in fact it merely serves to further highlight the insidious nature of the headline and the nasty journalistic choices of the author.