> In fact the "hick" position is the scientific one. If someone eats unrefrigerated pizza ten times without any Adverse Events, then in fact that's an experiment providing (admittedly crude) scientific data
I'm going to strenuously disagree with this one.
"I've done it 10 times and it has been fine for me" is the logic behind the normalization of deviance and the Shuttle disasters and (in my world) cave diving fatalities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
As a cave diver I also see this leading to fatalities where divers cut corners on the rules of cave diving, see no immediate consequences and continue to do so up until they wind up dead some day (there are often very binary outcomes for breaking the rules in cave diving).
The author of this article does provide a fairly compelling science-based _hypothesis_ though as to why eating-8-hour-cold-pizza is safe though that goes beyond his personal experience. He does argue that the N is actually very large due to reasonable assumption that many college students do this and there is no evidence of a plague of college students in ERs. He also argues that pizza specifically should be pretty safe after 8 hours due to most of it being composed of things with longer shelf lives and tomato sauce having a low pH.
That is still mostly all the kinds of rationalization that NASA did though. So those should be at least somewhat scientifically tested. A simple survey of college students could determine their practices of how often they ate morning-after pizza that had been left out, along with surveying hospitals and ERs. Then you could lab test actual cold pizzas. That would provide some better scientific basis rather than anecdote and gut checks.
We all expect that if you did this that you'd find that it was substantially more safe than the expert guidelines suggest for those reasons.
HOWEVER leaping all the way to "I did it 10 times and it didn't hurt me" is precisely how cave divers wind up dead. That isn't scientific at all.
And in fact this article suggests a broader connection to the normalization of deviance. There are times where you can get away with it over and over again and nothing bad happens. Many other people can do so as well, because it (presumably) turns out that expert guidance in this case is way too overcautious and dont-sue-me-generalized. What this reinforces is that the normalization of deviance doesn't have any consequences because you can get away with it. And you rationalize using anecdotes as scientific evidence as you just did. That builds confidence to do it in other ways. Then one day you're in charge of the shuttle program or go cave diving and you find out why anecdotes actually aren't scientific the hard way.
That does suggest why those kinds of rule are bad though. Because you find some rule like this and build up a tolerance to breaking it over and over and over again and getting away with it. Then you wind up making a category error at some point in the future and applying that logic to some other rule where you can't do that.