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Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

I think there's an emerging etiquette around this kind discourse that where "research" conflicts with personal experiences that attempts be made to cross-check and reconcile that. These days with all the bad science around we have to be a lot more careful about what we accept as fact.

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A pop-sci book seems like it's at least as good as personal anecdote, which is used on HN to claim all sorts of bizarre things.

I would rate personal anecdote higher.

Pop-sci often adopts sensationalism at the expense of rigour in order to shift volumes.

At least personal, lived experience can be taken at face value, if accepted in good faith as a truthful account, and can be cross-examined.

I'd say the opposite, because pop-science books at least represent an effort to collate multiple examples in support of some thesis and do not exclusively rely on the experiences of one individual. Of course we can see this used maliciously all the time (I think people are finally starting to turn on Malcolm Gladwell), but to me that just suggests both are fairly low-quality sources.

Except, you can't deny personal experience. The onus on science is to explain experience, not the other way round.

If you have an observer giving a truthful account that conflicts with an established fact then surely something must account for that discrepancy.

See for instance radio-waves vs Kirchoffs law. It's not that Kirchoff was wrong, it's just that he didn't account for frequency as a variable, which was solved by Maxwell.

Now, that's for established facts. If you're talking about commercially adulterated science then you have an even higher burden to bear.

Of course you can, or I'd have to accept all sorts of wild claims about alien abductions and near-death experiences. Even discounting such extreme examples, personal experience, as presented by anecdote, is colored by the person's perceptions and beliefs, both before and after the experience they relate.

ah you're just being facaetious now. We are discussing a very specific phenomenon where prevalent observer experience can't just be chalked down to fantasy.

People rejected the germ theory of disease because, among other reasons, they didn't feel it was in accord with their personal experience. Personal experience is the root of baseless superstition. Tell me what's wrong with these different examples, which fit the new criteria you've added.

We're discussing the experience of educated, and critical truthful observers, vs sensationalistic scientism and you throw up alien abductions, life-after-death experience and something about germ theory. I don't know which people you're talking about but it's been known for time immemorial among many cultures that cleanliness is a good way to avoid disease. You are cherry-picking narratives to suite your rhetoric.

We need to be beyond a level of discourse where "because science" or "a study said" is considered a fait acompli. Science often contradicts herself and studies are often debunked.

Just because "some guy wrote it", doesn't make it so.

> We need to be beyond a level of discourse where "because science" or "a study said" is considered a fait acompli. Science often contradicts herself and studies are often debunked.

I don't disagree. But I don't think personal anecdote is a sufficient answer. You could criticize the quality of the research (in more specific terms than "pop-sci") or present contradictory evidence and I'd have no problem with it. Simply attacking a guy in a casual discussion that is not particularly rigorous for posting a citation you deem insufficiently rigorous without further explanation I do not think is fair.

Huh?

Initially, I merely proposed that in the modern world we need to be more rigorous in our evaluation of scientific propositions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083635

That's where you joined in.

I had wrongly attributed the DanBC comment to you. Sorry.

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