I had to vote this up because of the meta-nature of the article. If anybody makes a comment disagreeing with it while sharing an anecdote they only play into's the author's theme! It's like accusing somebody of being in denial: there's nothing they can say in return that doesn't somehow support the idea that they are in denial. Love it.

Having said that, this is another really bad article in what seems like an endless series of bad articles on HN. Here are a few of the more obvious flaws:

- There is no universal truth as the author seems to imply. Simply because some publication or source you may like has performed some sort of statistical study doesn't have a lot of meaning on it's own. Yes, 100% of the people who eat bananas are dead within 120 years of their consumption. No, that does not mean bananas are bad. The study or scientific reporting is simply the beginning of a much longer conversation society has over many decades that leads us to higher-fidelity models.

- The purpose of a social site is to behave socially. While places like HN have (or used to have) a lot of different guidelines for the types of behaviors that are encouraged or not, being social means sharing stories, anecdotes. We are not robots.

- The idea that people are unable to sort out personal anecdotes from other forms of information. The follow-up idea that since they are not able to do this, we should prevent ourselves from sharing such stories. This is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad .... bad(n). We are humans. We share stories. Anybody who says "people are so stupid" can justify just about damn near anything as long as they keep emphasizing the stupidity and danger some people's actions represent.

Every now and then, gasp(!), published research is either wrong or doesn't show anything near what the reporter claims. Anecdotes don't help with this, of course, but they serve to remind us that even well-known scientists working at the highest quality standards available are still just sharing with us a very specialized form on anecdote. We did these things in this way and this is what we observed. Here is how you also can observe this. The really "good" part of the story they are sharing is talking about hidden assumptions, population variance, reproducibility, and so forth. Anecdotes don't do this, but they help us brainstorm ways in which we can improve the discussion, take the next experiment to an even better place.

I'm very uncomfortable with the line of reasoning that goes somewhat like this: people are broken in some way, therefore we must somehow control what they read, say, or think for their own good. To me the beauty of western civilization is that really broken people can do these amazing and awesome things. The fact that we're deeply flawed is the magic. Science and human advancement work because of our flaws, not in spite of them. This is a very important thing to understand! Setting up some ideal of perfection, no matter how well-intended, and then mucking around with the way societal interaction works in some effort to improve on things is heading down a very dark path that has a very unhappy ending. This attitude seems rife in the technology community, however, perhaps because we are such analytical people.

I don't want my fellow man to be irrational and distrustful of science and knowledge. But I'll take that any day over silencing contrarian articles and dissent. We've done the math on this: wrong people who share emotional stories and persuade crowds about all sorts of illogical things are a price that a dynamic community pays for progress.