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Comment by judahmeek | Hacker News Reader

You mean that one anecdote does not invalidate another?

it's true that one anecdote does not invalidate another, but assuming truthfulness of both anecdotes the first anecdote seems more wide ranging and likely to give a better view of problems in the system.

Then I could counter argue with another anecdote that I visited thousands of such facilities and in all of them cases of magic healing once the insurance money dried up happened.

Merely extending the scope of an anecdote does not change the fact that it is an anecdote and does not provide greater power to convince.

The original comment claimed to be an EMT. That makes their comment a professional experience or professional opinion where as yours is an anecdote.

Professional experience? Inventing new speak for anecdotes on the fly, bravo.

How is that the case? The first anecdote is someone with only glancing knowledge of the people taken to the mental health facility. They pick them up, probably on a very bad day, and drop them off without seeing evidence of wrongdoing. What evidence would they see? A mustachioed doctor twirling his mustache and laughing maniacally? By contrast, the other anecdote has intimate knowledge of an individual affected by the system for the course of their involvement with it.

I don't think either anecdote is compelling, but I do think it is wrong to weigh one as greater than the other.

This is fundamentally the problem of anecdotes and why objective data is needed to resolve these circular arguments

Not to mention the fact that neither comment says which country or region they're based in. I suspect these things can vary a lot by geography, yet both are making very generalized statements.

> objective data

A single anecdote is an existence proof.

(or a lie or misunderstanding)

True. Further complicating matters, I believe there is a correlation between misunderstanding and willingness to share anecdotes (across the general population, not specific to this thread).

Which may be indicative there is not enough data available to support a conclusion, so a person operates with the information most available to them, which may count as a contribution to that data ultimately.

To be fair, one anecdote is the viewpoint from the eyes of someone in the "system" while the other is a viewpoint of those affected by the system. Its essentially recreating the initial conversation of police vs people. One side says all good in the neighborhood, the other says corruption is still a problem.

For one thing, we frequently see many of the same patients again, back on the street or in their communities, which is pretty definitive reason to think they're not locked up indefinitely.

If the primary exploit is siphoning insurance money, is it possible that your frequent fliers have worse insurance than the subjects in the contra anecdote?

Yes, as I acknowledged in another comment.[0]

But it's not especially relevant to the point I was responding to: this program, where police are replaced by healthcare professionals, primarily deals with people who lack housing or income, which makes the commenter's concern a lot less relevant to this particular discussion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033144

In your experience, do they get better after their stint in the psych ward, or are they pretty much the same, or are they worse?

My experience dealing with the homeless on the streets of Seattle is they seemed to either stay the same or get worse. I never saw one person get better from a stay in the psych ward, it seems at best a place to keep them locked up for a little bit and then turf them back out on the street.

Notice how psychiatrists and psych hospitals don't really advertise much anything about "cure rates" or percentages cured. You compare that to any other field of medicine which often talks about percentages of outcomes, especially for fields like surgery, infectious diseases, oncology, etc... and you find the primary reason why I personally (and many others) do not find the field of psychiatry to offer much beyond "medicate and manage" while syphoning insurance money and government funding, and while also causing potentially horrible side effects.

The existence of houses which are not fire does not mean the risk of house fires is unworthy of consideration.

I think it's more along the lines of one anecdote doesn't invalidate Occam's razor, and the Occam's razor in this scenario is that psych facilities are acting in good faith.

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