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Comment by t888 | Hacker News Reader

1. I’m not the one making the claim without evidence. You are.

2. I see absolutely no reason why the null hypothesis should be that a randomly selected social group would be unbiased about any particular issue by default. If you think about it for any length of time you should see that as implausible on its face.

3. You’ve just made up a weird ’counter hypothesis’ of pro Apple bias of your own and thrown it into the discussion for no apparent reason, while claiming not to be willing to defend it. That seems underhanded.

4. Why not just provide some evidence? I’m even more sure you’re wrong now that you’ve chosen to defend your position using these tactics, since it would be trivial for you to provide a link if you actually do remember such a discussion.

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You started this by asking

> Have you seen any positive discussion of Apple here?

strongly implying that you think there's no positive discussion of Apple here.

> I see absolutely no reason why the null hypothesis should be that a randomly selected social group would be unbiased about any particular issue by default. If you think about it for any length of time you should see that as implausible on its face.

Wikipedia: "The null hypothesis is a default hypothesis that a quantity to be measured is zero (null)."

You're looking for an effect, in this case "bias for or against Apple", and claim not only that it's nonzero but that it has a certain sign. The only reasonable null hypothesis is that there's no bias, because without doing an actual study, there's no way to say whether any bias that might exist is pro- or contra-Apple. And "I never see anything good said about Apple" only counts as extremely weak evidence, given how incredibly prone to confirmation bias humans are.

So? You made a claim that you had actually seen “lots and lots” of positive discussions, yourself. That’s not just a question with an implied direction. You claim to have seen the evidence with your own eyes. And yet when asked produce it you immediately began protesting that you didn’t have to.

You can’t produce the evidence, because there isn’t any. You made your claim without regard for evidence, because even a trivial search for Apple related material shows an overwhelmingly negative view of Apple here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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