<story><title>I am very real</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andywood</author><text>I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I&apos;m talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn&apos;t appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There&apos;s an aggressive form (&quot;Citation Needed&quot;) and a passive-aggressive form (&quot;Say, friend, that&apos;s a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you have a source where I might read more about it?&quot;)&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this is completely appropriate, as when someone is using an anecdote as their only support in a vigorous debate, or when  information is clearly being presented as factual, when it probably isn&apos;t. But as &quot;Citation Needed&quot; has become a rampant meme in its own right, I think it is increasingly applied in knee-jerk, cargo-cultish, and inappropriate ways.&lt;p&gt;Sharing anecdotes and experiences is one of the fundamental ways that humans share information about the myriad little nooks of the world that we move through. I know it isn&apos;t science. I&apos;m quite well read on cognitive biases, statistics, and the scientific method; and I do not need to be reminded about these by HN commenters continually, every time somebody shares a story, or an opinion based on their experience.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m concerned about a chilling effect on the sharing of anecdotal information. There is information - information that I can use - in the many experiences related by others. I don&apos;t need or desire to get fully 100% of my information from peer-reviewed scientific studies. I know the difference between science and personal experience, and I would much rather bear the burden of telling the difference for myself, as the reader, than to have fewer people talking about their personal experiences.</text></item><item><author>reason</author><text>This submission could not have come at a better time.&lt;p&gt;Over the past couple of weeks, I&apos;ve been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt;, and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt;, and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about &lt;i&gt;humans&lt;/i&gt; - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles.&lt;p&gt;All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been guilty of it in the past too. But there&apos;s something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It&apos;s sad to see.&lt;p&gt;So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask yourself if you&apos;re being human and remind yourself that whatever you&apos;re about to say is directed at another human.&lt;p&gt;Stop being robots, and just act human.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalid</author><text>Thanks for eloquently stating a problem I&apos;ve noticed for a while. I think there&apos;s a fear of not coming off as a hard-nosed, logical thinker, so the constant need for citation is a proxy for &quot;I believed XYZ because some authority said it was true. If I&apos;m wrong, it&apos;s not me, it&apos;s because I was mislead.&quot;&lt;p&gt;The world is full of single data points. If you see an anecdote, see it as a data point, but more importantly, see it as a metaphor which could apply to your situation.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I think some people wouldn&apos;t hug their kids until a study said it was ok (hrm, weren&apos;t there studies in the 50s saying you should do the opposite?). I&apos;d like to think I&apos;m rational, but sometimes you need to move beyond the cover-your-ass safety net of &quot;the study says&quot; and do what feels right. Citation? Here&apos;s a meta-study that most medical research studies are false (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>
<story><title>I am very real</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andywood</author><text>I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I&apos;m talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn&apos;t appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There&apos;s an aggressive form (&quot;Citation Needed&quot;) and a passive-aggressive form (&quot;Say, friend, that&apos;s a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you have a source where I might read more about it?&quot;)&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this is completely appropriate, as when someone is using an anecdote as their only support in a vigorous debate, or when  information is clearly being presented as factual, when it probably isn&apos;t. But as &quot;Citation Needed&quot; has become a rampant meme in its own right, I think it is increasingly applied in knee-jerk, cargo-cultish, and inappropriate ways.&lt;p&gt;Sharing anecdotes and experiences is one of the fundamental ways that humans share information about the myriad little nooks of the world that we move through. I know it isn&apos;t science. I&apos;m quite well read on cognitive biases, statistics, and the scientific method; and I do not need to be reminded about these by HN commenters continually, every time somebody shares a story, or an opinion based on their experience.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m concerned about a chilling effect on the sharing of anecdotal information. There is information - information that I can use - in the many experiences related by others. I don&apos;t need or desire to get fully 100% of my information from peer-reviewed scientific studies. I know the difference between science and personal experience, and I would much rather bear the burden of telling the difference for myself, as the reader, than to have fewer people talking about their personal experiences.</text></item><item><author>reason</author><text>This submission could not have come at a better time.&lt;p&gt;Over the past couple of weeks, I&apos;ve been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt;, and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt;, and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about &lt;i&gt;humans&lt;/i&gt; - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles.&lt;p&gt;All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been guilty of it in the past too. But there&apos;s something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It&apos;s sad to see.&lt;p&gt;So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask yourself if you&apos;re being human and remind yourself that whatever you&apos;re about to say is directed at another human.&lt;p&gt;Stop being robots, and just act human.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grepherder</author><text>Good point. To disagree so strongly when anectodal evidence is shared regardless of context became a culture in itself rather than a model for rational behaviour and is disruptive.&lt;p&gt;Academic science is an entirely different story. It&apos;s a growing body, and it grows by using previous information in its body, so any probability of disruptive/wrong data entering the system has to be reduced as much as it can with strict discipline. To apply the same standard to our daily lives is absurd - you could as well be against spoken conversation because it&apos;s too lossy and converse using pen&amp;#38;paper - speech recognition is tricky after all.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&apos;t take much more than common sense to get - you could formalize it for specific cases statistically, maybe using shannon entropy and such - anectodal information is still information and the loss of information by virtue of not being backed up by scientific method is in most cases insignificantly low - just think of it as an efficient compression algorithm.&lt;p&gt;If you aren&apos;t ethically against lossy audio/image/text compression, there is no reason to take such a strict stance against anectodal information. Most times it&apos;s very useful, just have your rationality filter/bs detector and the like on at all times like they should be.</text></comment>