101–110 of 158 posts
A contrarian anecdote may help expose an article being false or misleading in itself. For example: a review written by the manufacturer itself, or astroturfing. First we must determine the validity of the article existing in itself and any motivations or biases in it. For this, contrarian anecdotes are useful. This article seems to miss this point. Once we can accept the article at face value, then we may hit the bia…
The idea that the US Government conducted illegal eavesdropping/wiretapping operations against US Citizens was a "contrarian anecdote" in 2003.
This blog post condescendingly claims that HN readers are not sophisticated enough to balance out the sources that are input to their rational decision making process.
In reality, contrarian opinions sometimes turn out to be correct, and mainstream opinions sometimes turn out to be wrong. Often, the benefit of a contrarian opinion is that it causes people to ask more questions, which is rarely a bad thing.
People are sheeplike enough without having to be encouraged to follow the herd!
I suggest everyone find a few contrarian theories and imagine what it would be like if you rearranged your life as if you expected them to be totally true. Most people are unwilling to go that far, and yes, in that way contrarian stories can weaken rational processes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
Thanks for the useful counter-points...I'm now armed with some more anecdotes (hah!) on the other end of the "big pharma" spectrum.
=)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
You distinguish between people who are sharing anecdotes and people who are making strawmen arguments in the usual way that you'd distinguish them - by tone, follow-ups, etc. But if your sole contribution to a thread is "me too" (or "actually, not me too"), maybe that contribution isn't particularly valuable in itself.
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'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 th…
Theoretically, there is a "universal truth", but for all intents and purposes, there isn't outside the realm of Math.
We judge science's fidelity by how well it correlates with repeatable experiments - which may be characterized by some "universal truth", but that's besides the point. In Newton's day and age, newtonian mechanics seemed to describe essentially everything. And then it turned out to be a crude approximation that only works in large scales.
In 1900, there was a Physics convention, in which the tone was basically: We have everything worked out, except for 3 minor things - Michelson Morley light aberration (solving this required developing the theory of relativity), Black body radiation (solving this required developing quantum theory), and the Photoelectric effect (which also requires quantum theory to explain properly).
> Do you really need to give up the idea that anything is actually true in order to dispute this blog post?
No. But you do need to give up the idea that you have certainty of knowledge about how true things are.
> You seem to think that science and knowledge are just some form of political orthodoxy.
In math, they aren't. In physics, they aren't.
In biology, it's not so clear.
In medicine, and nutrition, there's a ridiculous amount of political orthodoxy and "religious" beliefs -- and last I heard, they were considered sciences.
Well 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?
I see this kind of stuff all the time on Reddit, and it's become so numbing that you know, no matter how well you construct an argument or how many facts you cite, someone will always come out of the wood works and tell you how you're wrong because it didn't happen that way for them. It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take that as a genuine counter-argument.
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…
- He is only arguing that there is universal truth in proxy by arguing that the scientific method is more valuable than anecdotal evidence. If you don't agree with that, you probably disagree with most of HN (pure conjecture, does anyone else here think anecdotal evidence is more valuable than statistical analysis?)
- I agree with you on this point. I don't think we should downvote comments because a fun discussion is what the comments are for, not to try to prove or disprove a study.
- Statistical analysis is not a specialized form of anecdote. That's a stretch.
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…
Indeed not, but to use the coined term, some things are truthier than others. By and large, we can make more informed and better decisions on the "truthiest" truths without mucking up the argument with individual, pointless anecdotes, especially when those anecdotes aren't backed by anything but what simply "happened" to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> 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? Theoretically, there is a "universal truth", but for all intents and purposes, there isn't outside the realm of Math. We judge science's fidelity by how well it correlates with repeatable experiments - which may be characterized by some "…
There is a huge difference between saying "something is true, but I don't know what (yet)" and "there is no such thing as truth"; between "a lot of people try to commandeer medicine to sell things" and "there is no actual truth of anything to discover in the field of medicine".