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Comment by dan00 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I'm really more bothered by the expected scientific rigorous from an essay like this.

He's a writer and is experiencing the difficulties of his work and how it effects his emotional well being. It shouldn't then really surprise that he sees a strong connection between his work as a writer and the depressions he has. That doesn't mean he's telling an objective truth about a writer's life, but he's telling a subjective "truth" of his life as a writer, and sometimes these subjective "truths" can tell you quite a bit about life.

Sometimes the HN crowd can get quite a bit annoying with its scientific thinking, because it's not always the appropiate method, and sometimes a single person can tell you more about a certain aspect of the world then any kind of scientific study.

I'm certainly not arguing against the scientific method, but to apply it in a reasonable way.

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The suggestion that there are other kinds of valid thinking besides scientific thinking is way off.

No matter how obvious something feels, you can't know it's truth value. Humans can have auditory, visual and conceptual delusions that are completely convincing and completely opposite of what other humans experience.

The only conclusion you can draw from this essay is it's actually how the author says he thinks he feels. This may be a good starting hypothesis for a more rigorous study, but it says very little about life in general.

For some definition of real, all these internal experiences are real. Not interpersonal, maybe, but they will have an effect on the person and on how they interact with the environment including other people.

Accounts like this also tell you what's possible. It might and probably won't be true for everyone, but nobody is unique enough that it won't be encountered again.

So even if it's just one author telling you about his internal world I'd say there is a little more to learn from this.

> but it says very little about life in general.

But you said it yourself, we can never know the absolute truth value.

I say let go of what life truly means, and enjoy the process of iteratively improving your own perspective. Humans always seek closure though - that's religion for me (!)

>The suggestion that there are other kinds of valid thinking besides scientific thinking is way off.

That's a very religious attitude you have about the scientific method. ;-)

Might we say that, based on our tests so far, the scientific method has produced reasonable results for explaining shared reality? (Defining truth is a different matter entirely.)

So you're saying your comment isn't valid thinking?

My comment would fall under the hypothesis generation step of the scientific method, just like the article.

It may or may not be proper thinking - without executing the remaining steps to test a theory, we can't know.

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