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Comment by b3lvedere | Hacker News Reader

I know several families who are absolutely not a building block of society. Some not by choice.

I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.

e.g. The claim: Planes are a very safe way to travel.

Followed by someone jumping up to say: I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.

Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.

HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:

∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))

and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.

You’re right it looks that way now i read it back. I’m sorry.

I understood your point. You did nothing wrong, the person replying to you read too much offense into what you wrote. They're looking for a fight. Ignore them.

All the time? HN attracts some ... interesting ... characters so I accept it as something that has likely happened at some point, but something common? Anecdotes aren't shared in some kind of weird effort to falsify an imagined mathematical proof. They are shared because that is the natural progression of a discussion.

More commonly we see things like,

A: "I went to work today"

B: "One time I was on my way to work but I slipped on the ice in my driveway and ended up in the ER with a broken leg instead"

A: "Your broken leg does not disprove that I went to work today..."

Where A is trying to relive their glory days on Reddit where such a retort would have been considered funny, but thankfully most HN accounts know better than to think that is still funny, or that it was ever considered funny on HN. This thread being illustrative of one such exception, of course.

My apologies, for that was not my intention. More that it’s not all binary good or bad. I should not have typed that fallacy.

Why would someone take time out of their day to contradict or narrow someone else's so-called argument? Nobody cares about your argument. Anecdotes are shared because someone found an anecdote, that came to mind based on previous discussion, to be interesting. Sometimes that interest isn't shared and the thread dies there, but other times others do find interest in it and discussion continues. That's the nature of discussion.

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