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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

My personal favorite is "The plural of anecdote is not data".

Correct. The plural of anecdote is conversation, which is exactly the reason we're here.

I think this one comes down to people misunderstanding the reason we're here in the first place. If you start to notice that the discussion here resembles the sort of conversation you'd have around the watercooler, that's probably has to do with the fact that Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler.

Complaining that that seems to be the case and asking people to stop having lively conversation is not really helping anybody. As much as some folks want this to be the Royal Society for Correctly And Properly Dismissing The Ideas Of Other People, it's not.

Good thing, too. That place wouldn't be any fun.

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It's immensely frustrating when someone is discussing a well conducted study showing an interesting result to have another person say "This feels wrong. I had $ANECDOTE, so maybe they researchers are missing $CONCLUSION_FROM_ANECDOTE?", which has been covered in the study and in the HN comments and is just a weird point anyway.

This is true, but there is also the reverse situation - sometimes there is no hard data, in which anecdotes are the nearest thing that we have. I can't help feeling that "the plural of anecdote is not data" should require a link to the relevant data that the parent post had apparently missed. This would be an excellent rebuttal to the anecdote and advance the conversation more than the one-liner...

Most of the conclusions I find in comments on HN, are rarely conclusive. I've always struggled with comments that provide one data point (or better yet, a generalization of data points) that the user declares a conclusion from. I can't tell if I'm just being pessimistic when I detract these poorly thought out conclusions or if they are genuinely good for the discussion.

Because comments probably aren't the best place to talk about conclusive anything: it's a discussion. If you've done the leg work to get something solid it can at least get the discussion it deserves if submitted to HN.

> Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler.

A watercooler in a very passive aggressive, argumentative office perhaps. HN should be more like a watercooler, IMO, with more common courtesy and less flamewars (and less devil's-advocate-for-the-sake-of-devil's-advocate). But at the end of the day, the internet is the internet. (Just a side note: I'll still come on HN every day despite this :) )

The water cooler is a place for things like gossip, stupid jokes and discussions of television shows. I hope we don't all begin to assume this is what HN should be, particularly when consequential topics are being discussed (vaccination, etc.)

If I apply a corrosive black salve to my face and I feel that this saved me from cancer and really want to share it as advice, my story actually does nothing to establish self-application of black salve as an advisable practice. It is indeed an anecdote, not data. It should not be taken as data. This is very important, or people will be misled and burn their noses off.

It's a water cooler for people who really, really like to understand how things work - and who also tend to have a lot of ideas that they want to share freely.

It's also funny because, conceptually, it's not true. By anecdote we tend to mean one observation drawn from some system. If nothing else the anecdote tells you that that outcome has non-zero probability.

I'll add calling things "Cargo Cult" to my list of pet peeves. The Cargo Cult example is getting Cargo Culted.

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