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by sombremesa 3091 days ago
Good question. From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-s...

  But the question remains: what happens when (like in most cases) you don’t have a funnel plot?

  I don’t have a good positive answer. I do have several good negative answers.

  Decrease your confidence about most things if you’re not sure that you’ve investigated every piece of evidence.

  Do not trust websites which are obviously biased (eg Free Republic, Daily Kos, Dr. Oz) when they tell you they’re going to give you “the state of the evidence” on a certain issue, even if the evidence seems very stately indeed. This goes double for any site that contains a list of “myths and facts about X”, quadruple for any site that uses phrases like “ingroup member uses actual FACTS to DEMOLISH the outgroup’s lies about Y”, and octuple for RationalWiki.

  Most important, even if someone gives you what seems like overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view, don’t trust it until you’ve done a simple Google search to see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence.
1 comments
mcguire 3090 days ago
(As an aside, please don't use indentation for quoting. I like your points, but they're hard to read:

"But the question remains: what happens when (like in most cases) you don’t have a funnel plot?

"I don’t have a good positive answer. I do have several good negative answers.

"Decrease your confidence about most things if you’re not sure that you’ve investigated every piece of evidence.

"Do not trust websites which are obviously biased (eg Free Republic, Daily Kos, Dr. Oz) when they tell you they’re going to give you “the state of the evidence” on a certain issue, even if the evidence seems very stately indeed. This goes double for any site that contains a list of “myths and facts about X”, quadruple for any site that uses phrases like “ingroup member uses actual FACTS to DEMOLISH the outgroup’s lies about Y”, and octuple for RationalWiki.

"Most important, even if someone gives you what seems like overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view, don’t trust it until you’ve done a simple Google search to see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence."

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