[pgsandstrom]

Are people joking when they defend anecdotal stories with "once this anecdotal story proved to be true and the study was faulty"?

The proposition that the article makes is not that anecdotal stories must be false, but that they might influence the reader more than they should. Thus they should not be encouraged.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah, thanks for deciding how gullible I am, and please do sanitize what I get to read for my own good. That's how open dialog works, right?

[pgsandstrom]

What do you think the voting system on HN does? It promotes good content, thus also demotes bad content. The author is saying "Here is a reason that content X is bad. If you agree with me, downvote it".

[JoeAltmaier]

Doesn't make sense. If the content is 'bad', moderator could expunge it. Or writer could be counseled on giving better posts. Or any number of things.

The voting system on HN sometimes demotes bad content. Far more often (discussed widely elsewhere) its used to assert agreement or disagreement. When used in this sense, its a sort of instant-poll.

In the case of anecdotal argument, it forms an ad-hoc 'scientific' experiment. The HN population weighs in using their own experience. Those who's memory (or ok, memory-triggered emotion response) aligns with the author may upvote etc.

To 'bad content' is uniformely suppressed instead, this social experiment is lost, and the community loses. The merit of instant-polls is debatable, but other such polls are supported here. In fact the test group on HN may exceed the original 'scientific paper' group by an order of magnitude. Its statistical significance may exceed a graduate student's narrow study.

[carbocation]

> Its statistical significance may exceed a graduate student's narrow study.

And thanks to selection bias, its external validity is likely zero. "Our HN poll found that 1 in every 10 people has founded and sold a company."