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Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

  > Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

its a microcosm of our entire political discourse as of late imo: everyone is talking anecdotes and feels and barely anyone is bringing the receipts (and if they do its barely noticed)

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But people's anecdotes are part of their life experience. I trust my personal life experience over anything I read, and if I trust a person, I value theirs over anything I read too.

That's just how humans are.

I get it, you like stories of individuals. We should figure out a way you can listen to more stories, so you can form an even better opinion! Perhaps we write them out, shorten them a bit. Or perhaps group them by similarity. And then if we count the types of story per category… and boom, we’ve invented statistics!

I know how to use statistics to tell nearly any story though, and I would love to trust statistics…

It has to do with unknown unknowns.

And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that shortcoming.

The point is that if you have over 100 correlates to assess a situation, any particular story you try to tell is probably a lie even with the best intentions.

I'd prefer a lie with a story over a lie with statistics.

At least the former doesn't pretend to be scientific or objective, it's just a story.

And ...boom! we lost the nuance, and shoehorned together disparate elements into a bunch of measurements, as if those explain everything (as opposed to needing explanations and a working theory themselves, and often fitting multiple theories about how they came about).

Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...

>this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).

It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.

As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.

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