You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes - <AUTHOR> http://thobbs.github.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-should-downvote-anecdotes/ <comment><USER4> In a world were 47 of 53 landmark cancer research papers were found to not be replicable... where one scientist admitted (after the meta-researchers tried 50 times to replicate the result and failed) that they had run the experiment 6 times and got the result once and reported that because it made a better "story"... where the act of suppressing refutations of other's bogus research is "culturally commonplace"...

Something is rotten in the core of science. These days I give the research the same weight I give the anecdote... and that is no weight at all.

Science has been supplanted by money and politics... At least anecdotes admit they're anecdotes!

[http://news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries- dont-h...](http://news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries-dont- hold-174216262.html)

<comment><USER5> This is utter hogwash.

I'm as critical as anyone (probably more so, check my comment history) of academic biology because of my background in it. There are certainly things wrong it. And due to the nature of biology, replicating results _is really hard_. It's a fact of life when you deal with systems that are not perfect, not identical and very opaque.

But to say that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is stretching the problems of biology into a mountain of conspiracy.

Furthermore, I'm reading your "source" and it reads loudly as "I'm an underfunded big-pharma research who has neither the time nor the resources to properly replicate studies". Did you know that most big pharma labs do not have access to the academic literature? They mostly read abstracts because there is little budget to actually purchase the required papers.

How much do you trust labs that are A) only trying to recreate data so they can make a drug out of it and B) aren't even reading the original data? While academic labs can have grad students toil away on hard experiemnts for literally _years_ before they perfect them...how long do you think Pfizer or Merck or Glaxco-Smith is going to let their paid researchers fiddle away on a project that is probably low priority anyway?

Because, of course, the high-priority projects are the reformulations of penis-enlarging drugs or cholesterol medication...you know, the ones that actually make money.

If you are looking for snake oil and shady research, I dare you to read any research paper that comes out of big pharma labs. We would routinely read them just for laughs because they are (often) downright terrible.

<comment><USER6> While I agree that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is going way overboard. I'm going to take the other side of the argument because I think you are way off base. I worked in both an academic lab and a "big pharma" lab(4 years and 6 years respectively).

To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed a paper we didn't have access to, it took a few hours to get it. The company was more than willing to pay the $50 to get a copy of whatever paper, since we would often blow $50 running one experiment. Many of the smaller biotech might have poor access to journals, but even then, if you could justify the cost, you could get it.

Second of all, yes I trust labs that are trying to recreate data to make a drug out of it. You have to remember that these attempts to recreate data were a very important data point on a potential multi-million (billion?) dollar investment in a new target, these are NOT low priority projects. They WANT the data to be true. They have zero incentive for the data to not be reproducible.

Having worked in both academic and commercial labs, I would say the incentive to "tweak" results in much great in academic labs for the following reasons:

1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the work is use in a later project. Contrast this with a pharma lab where if the data is positive, you'll have to prove it again and again. 2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in academic (in fact, in the company I worked in, they preferred if you didn't publish) 3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of experience.

<comment><USER5> Fair points. My thoughts:

> _To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is > laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we > needed a paper we didn't have access to, it took a few hours to get it. The > company was more than willing to pay the $50 to get a copy of whatever > paper, since we would often blow $50 running one experiment._

I'll admit that my knowledge of big pharma journal access is colored by those in big pharma that I've talked to (anecdotal evidence, oh the irony). Perhaps they just had poor departments or bad access, I don't know.

However, every university that I've been at has _instant_ access to journals. I never had to wait hours for a paper...we had free reign of just about every journal. Even at my relatively small and poor undergraduate institute.

> _1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the > work is use in a later project._

99% of projects in academia are building off some previous grad student or post-doc's work. Sure, there are projects which are nearly impossible to replicate (I should know, I spent 1.5 years of my life trying to replicate a previous grad's project). But it's equally laughable to say that data is never double-checked - professor's career is a long string of projects building on previous projects.

> _2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in > [industry]_

I'll concede that there is often pressure to publish positive results in an academic setting. However, as you rightly mentioned, academics live and _die_ by their papers. It just takes one lab refuting your paper to have a burned career. While I agree that many academics prefer to just ignore papers they can't recreate, there is still a lot riding on publishing replicable data.

> _3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad > and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of > experience._

This is a pretty baseless statement? I know plenty of techs working at big pharma that just graduated with an undergrad degree and have zero of wet-bench experience (just like I know of plenty who did the same in academia). Conversely, I can't even count the number of post-docs and senior scientists that work at various universities, with literally centuries of experience between them.

<comment><USER6> To address your points:

1\. The big pharma guys have instant access to journals. When I say we had to wait a couple hours, it was because I was looking for a paper from "The Russian Journal of Chemistry" from 1912. We had a vendor who could track down anything. For any of the big journals, we had the same access as academia.

2\. We agree on this point. If a lab experiment is used in a later project, it HAS to work or else the future work can't occur. However, lots of projects have "arms", where the experiment is an interesting observation that is never pursued. These are often "one-off" experiments that are published, but never repeated in the same lab.

3\. I am by no means painting academics with a broad brush here. I think most academic research is done on the up-and-up and the results are valid, if not hard to replicate (this is research!). I think one issue is the one pointed out in the parent comment. You run 5 reactions, two fail and the three that work produce yields of 50%, 70% and 80%. What gets published? 80%. The devil is in the details. In big pharma, you are trying to make a drug and the science better work or else you can't bring it to market. Much higher standards for reproducibility.

4\. I guess my thought here is based on the fact that big pharma typically hires from academic labs. All those post-docs and senior scientists with years of experience? That's who big pharma hires. So overall, I would imagine that the level of experience in big pharma is greater than the average you would see in academia (which makes sense since academia is training for working in places like big pharma).

Once again, I always shy away from descriptions that put all "big pharma" or "academic" researchers into one pile. There are brilliant people on both sides and crappy people on both sides.

<comment><USER5> Ok, I'm with you on all your points. I suppose I over-reacted to the grandparent post - it felt like useless sensationalism and conspiracy- mongering.

Thanks for the useful counter-points...I'm now armed with some more anecdotes (hah!) on the other end of the "big pharma" spectrum.

=)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No. Contrarian anecdotes are good. They may turn out to be without merit, but then again so may the article itself. Having a real discussion is a good thing.

Also, I would like to propose a logarithmic scale for weighting such things. Say, if the article in question found something extraordinarily significant with 100 out of 100 samples resulting in A, then it's still not rational to weigh a contrarian viewpoint resulting in B with 1/101 - it should maybe be closer to 1/3 or something.

Consensus culture and worship authority are not desirable in my opinion. Arguments should be weighed on their merits and it's appropriate to explore other viewpoints or explanations even if they turn out to be dead ends most of the time.

<comment> loup-vaillant Let's take an example, since they seem to work best: vaccines.

Vaccines protect you from the risk of contracting particular diseases, some of which are crippling, lethal, or incurable. Plus, most are extremely effective: once you take your shots, you are effectively immune. That's good.

There is a downside however. Sometimes, vaccines have side effects. Most side effects are quite benign, but if you're unlucky enough, they can be crippling, lethal, or incurable. That's bad.

From a medical point of view, vaccines are a net good (let's leave aside logistic considerations, or the effort required to go to the doctor). When you look at the stats, you stand a much better chance at life and health if you take the shot. Even for relatively minor illnesses like the flu.

Now, let's say someone post a heartbreaking comment about how her 9 year old daughter died of a vaccine shot, with all the gory details about the suffering, how she couldn't participate in her school's festival, the size of the coffin… I'm quite sure there _are_ stories of the kind. Given the sheer amount of readers here, maybe one of you will more or less directly relate to that. My apologies to those who do.

Nevertheless, what makes a good story doesn't necessarily make good evidence. When you know of reliable statistics, and you read a contrarian anecdote, you should shift your belief in the direction of the anecdote by a precise amount, which is almost always tiny. What your brain will actually do behind you back however, is shifting your belief by a _significant_ amount, often crossing the "reasonable doubt" line. That's not rational, but that's what will happen. Nameless statistics feel abstract, remote. An anecdote on the other hand feels concrete, real, close. Worse, you can spend far more time reading about the salient anecdotes than learning about the end results of reliable, but boring, scientific studies.

Another example: you don't win the lottery. Period. You don't know of any close family of friend that ever did. But maybe one of you readers do. Maybe that one could comment and say "Hey, but my cousin _did_ win the lottery!". Would that prove me wrong? Not at all. It's just that when the sample size is huge enough, even the tiniest chance can actualize.

<comment><USER4> Are you actually arguing against giving anecdotes weight by using... anecdotes?

<comment><USER8> Those are examples, not anecdotes.

<comment> loup-vaillant Yes, but I did make use of strong emotional story-like elements to make my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The simplification in the title is dangerous without a 'when' attached. Mindlessly downvoting contrarian anecdotes will lead to a hive-mind. Beware.

Opinions overwhelm all other forms of material in a discussion. Anecdotes are actually one up from opinions as they are concrete. You should weight them like so:

Statistical Evidence + Logic > Statistical Evidence > "Common Knowledge/Wisdom" > Anecdote + Logic > Anecdote > Opinion + Logic > Opinion

</comment><comment><USER10> In my experience, some of the best advice I've ever received has been from anecdotes that run counter to the text of an article.

...I kid. It's actually an interesting idea. I don't know about scrapping them entirely, but I think a lot of sites (say, Reddit) could benefit from moving the anecdotes elsewhere. Partially because of this, and partially because anecdotes in any form tend to derail the discussion pretty darn quick.

<comment><USER11> This is what makes r/AskScience so good. "Free of anecdotes" is a rule for posts, and it is vigorously enforced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The idea that there was an impending credit crisis was a "contrarian anecdote" in 2008.

The idea that the US Government conducted illegal eavesdropping/wiretapping operations against US Citizens was a "contrarian anecdote" in 2003.

This blog post condescendingly claims that HN readers are not sophisticated enough to balance out the sources that are input to their rational decision making process.

In reality, contrarian opinions sometimes turn out to be correct, and mainstream opinions sometimes turn out to be wrong. Often, the benefit of a contrarian opinion is that it causes people to ask more questions, which is rarely a bad thing.

People are sheeplike enough without having to be encouraged to follow the herd!

I suggest everyone find a few contrarian theories and imagine what it would be like if you rearranged your life as if you expected them to be totally true. Most people are unwilling to go that far, and yes, in that way contrarian stories can weaken rational processes.

<comment><USER13> _The idea that there was an impending credit crisis was a "contrarian anecdote" in 2008._

As the saying goes: they laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Einstein.

And they laughed at Bozo the Clown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You shouldn't downvote contrarian anecdotes. You should just take them at face value for what they are.

His notion that in the field of medicine you should disregard contrarian anecdotes because there's statistical evidence is horrible advice. If you actually looked at said statistical evidence, you'd realize it is very rarely strong, and often only relevant to 70% or so of the population (which is great for 2 out of 3, but useless for the third one).

"Best practices" often aren't, and common sense is not at all common in medicine. A significant number of published results are plain wrong (see <http://saveyourself.ca/articles/ioannidis.php> and the paper it references). A lot of medical advice is wrong, harmful or useless; The archives of seth roberts' blog are an enlightening read.

<comment><USER15> >You should just take them at face value for what they are.

The problem is that this is impossible for most people.

<comment><USER14> That's true, and they also get to vote (both on HN, and in real world elections). Imagine the consequences! Or just observe them in the real world....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the comments below are too laborious for you to read, here is the TL;DR of them:

(1) Use your personal discretion. Some anecdotes are funny. Others can be perfectly cogent rebuttals, especially when people make overbroad statements.[a]

(2) The author is right in some respects: you need to be aware of the ways that stupid stories can bias you. Even being aware of this fact is sometimes not sufficient, so use downvoting to try to protect others.

(3) Lots of people believe in anecdotal responses to anecdotal original- claims. [b]

(4) A lot of people tried to be funny by offering anecdotes to be downvoted. Unfortunately, people haven't consistently taken the advice above, so they are not all in one place (at the bottom). That is a pity -- this would have been a fun and interesting use of downvotes.

[a] Actually, the discussion is full of overbroad statements of this form like "no universal truth" and someone presenting "nothing should be above questioning" as above question.

[b] I would like to formally respond that this is generally stupid -- you don't clean up a house by flinging crap at the crap. Your mileage may vary.

</comment><comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER18> The author was referring to contrarian anecdotes in reply to statistical data, not someone's opinion.

\- He is only arguing that there is universal truth in proxy by arguing that the scientific method is more valuable than anecdotal evidence. If you don't agree with that, you probably disagree with most of HN (pure conjecture, does anyone else here think anecdotal evidence is more valuable than statistical analysis?)

\- I agree with you on this point. I don't think we should downvote comments because a fun discussion is what the comments are for, not to try to prove or disprove a study.

\- Statistical analysis is not a specialized form of anecdote. That's a stretch.

<comment><USER14> > He is only arguing that there is universal truth in proxy by arguing that > the scientific method is more valuable than anecdotal evidence.

The strawman here is in equating (published) statistical analysis with the scientific method. Of course the scientific method is more valuable, but that's not necessarily relevant.

Please have a look at <http://xkcd.com/882/> if you haven't already - <USER2> this comic describes is a very valid statistical analysis, according to the "scientific method", (only neglecting base rates like 99% of published papers do).

This is (unfortunately) very commonly practiced in the life sciences, including medicine -- sometimes knowingly but mostly unknowingly. Bad reporting not required for a horrible, long lasting effect on the future.

<comment><USER19> Scientists' use of statistics is often problematic, but that doesn't mean that its valid to counter statistics with anecdote unless you have some larger argument.

<comment><USER14> Right. But it is also not valid to bring up statistics unless you can properly qualify their relevance, which is almost never the case. This requirement sets much higher bar for anecdotes than published statistics, when the latter rarely deserves that high bar.

As a result, most arguments about science are invalid from a scientific-method point of view. But the claims brought up -- including anecdotes -- are often interesting and informative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> By this logic, HN'ers should downvote any anecdote describing successfully exiting a startup because statistics show that the vast majority of startups fail and these anecdotes describing success unduly influence the thinking of entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER19> Only if its offered as a counterexample to the proposition that most startups fail.

<comment><USER20> One might suggest that that such a proposition is an underlying premise of HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You should question everything. This includes studies published and labeled "scientific".

Contrarian anecdotes are important (but they too should be questioned).

Nothing should be above questioning; even prevailing wisdom.

<comment><USER22> >even prevailing wisdom.

Especially prevailing wisdom, since it is least likely to be questioned normally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 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.

<comment><USER24> 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?

<comment><USER23> 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".

<comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER25> > 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."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Rebuttals to articles (ones that are voted up anyway) in the comment section are almost always well reasoned refutations. This article is addressing a non- problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Contrarian anecdotes are an ill-conceived method of contributing to a conversation, and doing so in some sort of attention-getting way. They appear to all but undermine the entire premise of the original content, and yet, are based on absolutely nothing but one's individual experience with the matter.

I see this kind of stuff all the time on Reddit, and it's become so numbing that you know, no matter how well you construct an argument or how many facts you cite, someone will always come out of the wood works and tell you how you're wrong because it didn't happen that way for them. It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take that as a genuine counter-argument.

</comment><comment><USER28> Contrarian anecdotes can be very useful (and logically sound) when they are contrary to a generalization. If someone asserts "f(x) = 5 for all x in A", "f(a) = 3 and a in A" is a logical contradiction proving the assertion false.

And, frankly, if we're talking about public discussion of scientific papers, inappropriate generalization is as big a problem as contrarian anecdotes, if not bigger. Scientific papers often cover highly specific observations that are useful primarily to other researchers, and often even then not for many years. People then try to apply that specific knowledge to practical day to day situations.

<comment><USER19> Have you ever seen that sort of generalization in an article on Hacker News? Even when you have situations like, e.g. nobody has ever recorded a case of a person with a certain genotype being infected by a norovirus, you don't see papers claiming that its impossible.

<comment><USER28> Yes. Realize that often the generalizations are a lot more subtle than your example, and of course anecdotes aren't always the best or only counter- arguments you'll see, even if they are valid. Start looking and I am sure you will find examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm all in when it comes to call bullshit on something. But because we (hackers) are used to boolean decisions, we are looking for counter-examples.

But these are just non-arguments when the finding is "In 9 out of 10 cases, ...". The anecdote is the 1 out of 10 case.

Let's try to question anything, and when it is suspicious - by all means, say so! But, I guess what the author is trying to say (beyond the whole Downvote discussion) is that we should try to reason and make a proper argument. Especially one that is not already addressed in the research.

<comment><USER30> > But these are just non-arguments when the finding is "In 9 out of 10 cases, > ...". The anecdote is the 1 out of 10 case.

The whole point of the article is that people won't judge that anecdote as only 0.1 relevant, but much much more (I'd say close to 0.9 if they personally prefer what anecdote says to what research says). It's a general human flaw that's very visible in day-to-day interactions with people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "But in the presence of statistical evidence, don't tolerate contrarian anecdotes, and don't make them yourself, knowing the exaggerated impact they can have."

When you start to design a statistical experiment, you have already made an important methodological choice. See

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_Theory>

I've noticed that in my own field which is education, there appears to be a fondness for sophisticated statistics, even though no manager ever allocated students to teachers on a double blind random basis. An excellent example is the way the UK Education ministry has decided that 'phonics' is _the_ way to teach reading.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18462214>

I think that this general tendency might be an example the 'white coat syndrome' in action; belief that using formal statistical techniques might increase the meaningfulness of the results. I suppose that is a form of cargo cult.

This is hacker news, a forum aimed at people with novel business proposals and new software to try out. Should you be trying to find 'the Truth' or should you be building some grounded theory that tells you what to do next, provisionally, now, today?

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess it depends on the story. If HN is supposed to be about startup culture and technology, the anecdote is essential to being vibrant. What is a startup if not a story whose premise is unproven?

Now if you're telling me that your sister stuck a magnet in her ear and cured her cancer, I'm not going to give that credence without some real data.

Most things on HN are not that, and a good story often compels us to think. So FWIW, I'm not downvoting contrarians, and I'm not downvoting anecdotes for being anecdotes.

</comment><comment><USER33> I totally get where the author is coming from, but I am not _reeeally_ sure if that is good advice. Anecdotal evidence has its place, eg: proof by counterexample, challenging false, but widely held beliefs, or alerting people to new circumstances.

A: "Murrumbidgee River is fun and safe for children to swim in! No one came to any harm there for the last 100 years!" B: "Dunno... my dog was eaten by a crocodile there last Saturday..."

B's dog is a sample of one, but maybe worth paying attention to.

<comment><USER34> In your example, A is not relating a statistical or experimental finding, but instead dispensing commonsense knowledge which happens to be objectively false. It's not what the OP is talking about.

<comment><USER24> Commonsense, like ulcers are caused by diet and anxiety, or that salt raises blood pressure?

I think a good point is made: statistical evidence is also misleading - <USER3> deliberately ignores (averages out) the extreme cases. The results are a distribution; statistics folds that into one number. Anecdotes fill out the distribution.

<comment><USER25> Ulcers are not generally caused by diet and anxiety, but rather by bacterial infection. Anecdote is a much more compelling refutation of "common sense" than it is of empirical statistical evidence.

Statistical evidence is not misleading; it's simply the case that if you are seeking outliers, as in your example, then looking at _measures of central tendency_ won't contain what you're looking for. Anecdote has no role in "fill[ing] out the distribution."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A contrarian anecdote may help expose an article being false or misleading in itself. For example: a review written by the manufacturer itself, or astroturfing.

First we must determine the validity of the article existing in itself and any motivations or biases in it. For this, contrarian anecdotes are useful. This article seems to miss this point.

Once we can accept the article at face value, then we may hit the biases described.

<comment><USER36> I would say it is far easier to astroturf a contrarian anecdote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Or maybe just not upvote? Good argumentation, still can get in the way of why HN is here. It's not just a place to make formal argumentation, but to exchange experiences, or get some opinions from others. In some case the opinion is wished from experts (how can I get funded etc), in others it is about how a product is liked by general users. So please take a piece of salt in applying that ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> This is an extremely toxic position, which will lead to novices (who outnumber the experienced significantly) mathematically abusing voting systems to promote whatever this month's fad tool golden hammer is.

The herd is rarely correct.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well I think Stalin summed up the perils of totally ignoring anecdotes pretty well:

"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."

This topic sort of came up the other day in the thread about the girl losing the iPad software she needs to talk (Silencing Maya). <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103344>

Some commenters thought the story should be ignored as a data point about the societal value of patents. I disagree in that case because I don't believe economics or social sciences have anywhere near the amount of rigor and theory to make a good claim on whether the patent system is a net benefit to society. Deciding such a thing is a very old, and classic problem in philosophy. The OP seems to implicitly relying on a variant of utilitarianism, which IMO is wholefully inadequate to rely on for moral decisions.

Since science is so hard, there is a lot of bad science out there. What gets reported in the wider media has all sorts of weird selection bias, never mind what gets picked for publication in journals. Anecdotes are human stories and they are deeply connected to why we care. Statiscal tools can be used in ways that justify harm people in the name of greater good. I agree that scientific medicine provides tools for "real"'medicine that other methods don't. I just think we should remember to real peoples stories, especially if they are true. Anyone reading this probably gets that one can't exactly counter balance the effect of anecdotes within themselves. But it can still be countered some, I think it's worth it to hear stories (that are relaxant to the topic). Now what is the basis of my beliefs? Mostly intuition, not rationality. But I don't think it's possible to undermine my ideas with some kind of experimentally bases argument. There's just way to many variables!

<comment><USER40> I don't understand the part about Stalin's advice. What was Stalin saying would happen if you ignored anecdotes? How do you figure he was talking about the value of anecdotes?

<comment><USER39> He was talking about undertaking large activities (war for example) that would kill hundreds of thousands of people could be tolerated politically by a populace in a way that a single murder might cause an outrage. The large numbers make the horror abstract. It's easier for people to relate to a story about a specific individual.

The quote (and variations) are quite famous, it might be apocryphal, but I think it is true. Hearing about hundreds of thousands of people massacred in a foreign land doesn't hit home when you are reading about far away.

That's why reporters (New York Times style)try to weave in illustrations and stories about individuals even when discussing a larger trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As a caveat, you should only do this in response to data based articles. Articles that are themselves anecdotal, should receive anecdotes that are contrarian. I think the more general idea is comments should be held to similar standards of evidence that the article presents.

</comment><comment><USER42> If a post is about a topic that can and has been thoroughly researched and a reasonable conclusion has been drawn, then sure, a contrarian anecdote should probably be disregarded. But honestly, how often does that apply?

Most of the conversations on HackerNews aren't about things that have right and wrong answers. As a matter of fact, many of the most popular posts are nothing more than anecdotes themselves. So why exactly should an anecdote in the comments be downvoted?

</comment><comment><USER43> As someone who has had his ability to work saved due to anecdotal evidence, I could not disagree more with the OP. Well, sure, if someone has anecdotal evidence that the theory of gravity is wrong, or that 1 + 1 = 4, by all means downvote them, but not all scientific evidence is on such solid ground.

E.g., I've been prescribed medication and ended up with a side effect not listed on the drug literature. The doctor told me that the side-effect must be psychosomatic. Later scientific evidence revealed that about 50% of patients given the drug experienced the same side effect, but that it had been previously underreported. Who's to say that researchers would have even bothered to research the side effects more thoroughly if they hadn't paid attention to the fact that the anecdotal evidence contradicted the scientific evidence.

Or remember when the scientific evidence seemed to indicate that a high carbohydrate, low fat diet was the healthiest choice? Should I have ignored my anecdotal evidence that that diet made me feel like crap?

Science sometimes gets itself into harmful orthodoxies. See Thomas Kuhn for more info on this if you are unfamiliar. One example of this is Behaviorism in Psychology. In this field, it was scientific orthodoxy for many decades that Behaviorism was scientific and Cognitive Psychology was not because Behaviorism was based on only quantifiable, measurable data. It took Chomsky to point out the idiocy of this orthodoxy, thereby breaking the orthodoxy, allowing science to progress.

Re the anecdotal evidence that saved my career, I've read here that there is no scientific evidence that ergonomic keyboards can help prevent or ameleroate RSI. I am 100% sure, however, that the Kinesis Contour keyboard saved my ability to type. All I have to do to know this for sure is listen to my body. Furthermore, I personally know about a dozen programmers who feel similiarly. I'm sure that someone will pipe in that this is almost certainly the placebo effect. If that's the case, then Kinesis makes the world's very best placebo, as placebo-like things have done precious little for me in any other area. In any case, even if it were the placebo effect, what does it hurt anyone to ignore the putative scientific evidence and try out a Kinesis keyboard for themselves to see if it provides them with relief?

The idea that posts should be downvoted for recommending such ergonomic keyboards is insane.

</comment><comment><USER44> If best contrarian comments are weak - I assume that original article is probably correct.

If I don't see any contrarian comments, then I suspect groupthink in discussion.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's true, anecdotes are not data and have no statistical weight whatsoever.

However, anecdotes can and do (and should) play a large role in influencing how we think. They can humanize a problem and create food for thought in a way that no amount of statistics ever could.

For example, it's one thing to cite statistics that children of gay parents do just as well as those of straight parents (I have no idea if it's true, but it's an interesting contemporary question). But that's not likely to change the mind of a homophobe on the issue of gay adoption. On the flip side, a lucid, heartfelt anecdote from a person who had gay parents might actually help someone to _understand_ what it's like to grow up in that environment an therefore become sympathetic.

Of course, it has no bearing on the actual statistics at all, but sometimes statistics aren't the most important thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an excellent point, and well expressed. I do see how anecdotes and stories can be used in a very positive way to shift opinion; there are definitely some grey regions. (How do you know you're on the _right_ sight?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Please forgive me if I have fundamentally misunderstood this, but is this article suggesting that anecdotes are some how comparable to scientific research data?

If one wants to "attack" an anecdote, then a contrarian anecdote is the weapon.

If one wants to attack scientific data, you need contrarian scientific data.

At least, I hope that is right. There for, to mix the two is like attacking a tank with a wooden stick.

Surely, anecdotes are used as the premise of scientific research. Lots of people tell stories. There seems to be something interesting going on. Then you do the research and produce the data. If the data is conclusive, then your past the anecdote. If later contrarian anecdotes appear, and they seem significant, off you go to scientific research again.

I know Im wrong somewhere. But where?

</comment><comment><USER47> I've noticed that many of my biases, typically for or against some name brand or technology, even if not anecdotal, are _old_. I now try to remember not only how I came to this opinion, but _when_. I guess that's one of the consequences of aging.

<comment><USER48> My dad once received an inappropriate form letter from Texaco in the 1970's and never went to a Texaco station since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious what some of your (the community's) thoughts are on articles like this. While the article itself has a large amount of personal bias with unsubstantiated claims, the conversation it has broached has been rather rich and enlightening. However, that is largely due to its controversial and contrarian (ironically) nature. That said, while the conversation has been thoughtful and looks to have largely refuted article, because so much of the thoughts put up here in the comments have been to downplay the original article, my question is: "Was this article worth our time or just an elaborate waste of time since the premise was bunk?"

</comment><comment><USER50> I downvoted some contrarian anecdotes once, and it ruined the thread.

<comment><USER51> I downvoted some contrarian anecdotes once, and my "downvote" button was disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Anecdotes have their place, especially in complex domains. For example, I have a friend who uses medical marijuana successfully to control MS symptoms. That is a sample size of one, but it certainly colors my view of the debate. I have a much deeper view into the decision making process of a MS sufferer now than I would otherwise, one that goes beyond spasticity, pain, and cognitive scores.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is an interesting first submission by a Hacker News participant who joined the community 551 days ago. The core idea in the submitted blog post (by the submitter here) is

"Contrarian anecdotes like these are particularly common

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076643>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076066>

in medical discussions, even in fairly rational communities like HN. I find this particularly insidious (though the commenters mean no harm), because it can ultimately sway readers from taking advantage of statistically backed evidence for or against medical cures. Most topics aren't as serious as medicine, but the type of harm done is the same, only on a lesser scale."

The basic problem, as the interesting comments here illustrate, is that human thinking has biases that ratchet discussions in certain directions even if disagreement and debate is vigorous. The general issue of human cognitive biases was well discussed in Keith R. Stanovich's book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought.

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001646...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626)

[http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psycholog...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psychology/dp/0300164629/)

The author is an experienced cognitive science researcher and author of a previous book How to Think Straight about Psychology. He writes about aspects of human cognition that are not tapped by IQ tests. He is part of the mainstream of psychology in feeling comfortable with calling what is estimated by IQ tests "intelligence," but he disagrees that there are no other important aspects of human cognition. Rather, Stanovich says, there are many aspects of human cognition that can be summed up as "rationality" that explain why high- IQ people (he would say "intelligent people") do stupid things. Stanovich names a new concept, "dysrationalia," and explores the boundaries of that concept at the beginning of his book. His shows a welcome convergence in the point of view of the best writers on IQ testing, as James R. Flynn's recent book What Is Intelligence? supports these conclusions from a different direction with different evidence.

Stanovich develops a theoretical framework, based on the latest cognitive science, and illustrated by diagrams in his book, of the autonomous mind (rapid problem-solving modules with simple procedures evolutionarily developed or developed by practice), the algorithmic mind (roughly what IQ tests probe, characterized by fluid intelligence), and the reflective mind (habits of thinking and tools for rational cognition). He uses this framework to show how cognition tapped by IQ tests ("intelligence") interacts with various cognitive errors to produce dysrationalia. He describes several kinds of dysrationalia in detailed chapters in his book, referring to cases of human thinkers performing as cognitive misers, which is the default for all human beings, and posing many interesting problems that have been used in research to demonstrate cognitive errors.

For many kinds of errors in cognition, as Stanovich points out with multiple citations to peer-reviewed published research, the performance of high-IQ individuals is no better at all than the performance of low-IQ individuals. The default behavior of being a cognitive miser applies to everyone, as it is strongly selected for by evolution. In some cases, an experimenter can prompt a test subject on effective strategies to minimize cognitive errors, and in some of those cases prompted high-IQ individuals perform better than control groups. Stanovich concludes with dismay in a sentence he writes in bold print: "Intelligent people perform better only when you tell them what to do!"

Stanovich gives you the reader the chance to put your own cognition to the test. Many famous cognitive tests that have been presented to thousands of subjects in dozens of studies are included in the book. Read along, and try those cognitive tests on yourself. Stanovich comments that if the many cognitive tasks found in cognitive research were included in the item content of IQ tests, we would change the rank-ordering of many test-takers, and some persons now called intelligent would be called average, while some other people who are now called average would be called highly intelligent.

Stanovich then goes on to discuss the term "mindware" coined by David Perkins and illustrates two kinds of "mindware" problems. Some--most--people have little knowledge of correct reasoning processes, which Stanovich calls having "mindware gaps," and thus make many errors of reasoning. And most people have quite a lot of "contaminated mindware," ideas and beliefs that lead to repeated irrational behavior. High IQ does nothing to protect thinkers from contaminated mindware. Indeed, some forms of contaminated mindware appeal to high-IQ individuals by the complicated structure of the false belief system. He includes information about a survey of a high-IQ society that found widespread belief in false concepts from pseudoscience among the society members.

Near the end of the book, Stanovich revises his diagram of a cognitive model of the relationship between intelligence and rationality, and mentions the problem of serial associative cognition with focal bias, a form of thinking that requires fluid intelligence but that nonetheless is irrational. So there are some errors of cognition that are not helped at all by higher IQ.

In his last chapter, Stanovich raises the question of how different college admission procedures might be if they explicitly favored rationality, rather than IQ proxies such as high SAT scores, and lists some of social costs of widespread irrationality. He mentions some aspects of sound cognition that are learnable, and I encouraged my teenage son to read that section. He also makes the intriguing observation, "It is an interesting open question, for example, whether race and social class differences on measures of rationality would be found to be as large as those displayed on intelligence tests."

Applying these concepts to my observation of Hacker News discussions after 1309 days since joining the community, I notice that indeed most Hacker News participants (I don't claim to be an exception) enter into discussions supposing that their own comments are rational and based on sound evidence and logic. Discussions of medical treatment issues, the main concern of the submitted blog post, are highly emotional (many of us know of sad examples of close relatives who have suffered from long illnesses or who have died young despite heroic treatment) and thus personal anecdotes have strong saliency in such discussions. The process of rationally evaluating medical treatments is the subject on entire group blogs with daily posts

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/about- science-...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/about-science- based-medicine/)

and has huge implications for public policy. Not only is safe and effective medical treatment and prevention a matter of life and death, it is a matter of hundreds of billions of dollars of personal and tax-subsidized spending around the world, so it is important to get right.

Blog post author and submitter here tylerhobbs suggests disregarding an individual contrary anecdote, or a group of contrary anecdotes, as a response to a general statement about effective treatment or risk reduction established by a scientifically valid

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

study. With that suggestion I must agree. Even medical practitioners themselves do have difficulty sticking to the evidence,

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/how-do-you- fee...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/how-do-you-feel-about- evidence-based-medicine/)

and it doesn't advance the discussion here to bring up a few heart-wrenching personal stories if the weight of the evidence is contrary to the cognitive miser's easy conclusion from such a story.

That said, I see that the submitter here has developed an empirical understanding of what gets us going in a Hacker News discussion. Making a definite statement about what ought to be downvoted works much better in gaining comments and karma than asking an open-ended question about what should be upvoted, and I'm still curious about what kinds of comments most deserve to be upvoted. I'd like to learn from other people's advice on that issue how to promote more rational thinking here and how all of us can learn from one another about evaluating evidence for controversial claims.

</comment><comment><USER54> You shouldn't downvote to censor relevant information, period. You should only downvote if the material violates site guidelines. Downvoting to disagree is lazy, substituting easy censorship for thoughtful response. Instead, post your counter-argument or upvote an existing opinion that already expresses your position.

<comment><USER19> Censoring relevant information is, of course, never good but the authors contention was that the information isn't actually relevant. Its always good that people who are wrong get a cogent reply, but beyond that adding a "me too" post doesn't have any more benefit than a downvote does. I used to just upvote post I agreed with, but since those are no longer public the only way to clue readers in to what the consensus is is to downvote.

<comment><USER54> I'm not sure I'd agree he was arguing for the irrelevance of anecdotal evidence, only that it has a disproportionate impact when considered with statistical evidence. Rather than censoring the anecodotes, the better solution is to simply point out the danger of overweighting them.

The purpose of a site like HN is not to arrive at some kind of imaginary consensus, it's to inform and engage people in meaningful discussion. There is no winning side to be on, and no ultimate arbiter of truth. By downvoting as you do, you rob the site of content in exchange for an illusory sense of victory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51>
      For example, if a close friend goes on and on about how the Ford he bought
      was a piece of crap, detailing how the transmission failed at 30k miles
      and the rear-view mirror fell off, you'll be wary about buying a Ford in
      the future, even if Consumer Reports rates them highly.

Personal anecdote: I've got a '93 Ford Explorer. It has 237,000 miles on it, and has yet to have a single major component failure. I've been waiting for the goddamn thing to die for the last 70,000 miles, so I can buy a car that does better than 13 miles to the gallon, but no dice.

Don't buy Ford trucks. They're too reliable.

</comment><comment><USER55> Have their been stories with seemingly solid statistical data, where anecdotal evidence shows that the statistical evidence is wrong?

</comment><comment><USER56> Without contrary viewpoints there is always a danger of falling into overconfidence and group-think.

</comment><comment><USER57> I disagree. In my experience, this article is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER58> The author didn't pick good examples of contrarian anecdotes found on HN. They are contrary to a study on coffee consumption and dementia. The study, however, is only a sample of 124 people from Tampa and Miami. The study is just as likely to have found an isolated effect as the posters with family members who consumed a lot of coffee and still developed alzheimers.

You would be better served by this:

[https://sites.google.com/site/mccormickphilosophy/home/criti...](https://sites.google.com/site/mccormickphilosophy/home/critical- thinking-syllabus/critical-thinking-schedule/understanding-statistical- arguments)

The author must be a frequent coffee drinker who didn't like that some people had a different experience with coffee than some other people had, and felt compelled to write that post. It's not the contrarian anecdotes that left me with the sense that the research findings weren't conclusive. It's the fact that a population of 124 people in two cities is not at all representative of the target population which numbers over 40 million according to the census bureau.

<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>

Maybe when the study researchers conduct a larger study I'll believe them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment. I am most certainly _not_ claiming that you shouldn't question research findings on other grounds, such as sampling bias or statistical significance, as you have done here; those types of points are extremely valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> But .... but .... anecdotes are what politicians use to get elected !!!! (e.g. Joe the Plumber, et al).

If we downvote anecdotes, we won't have a justification to vote for scumbag politician with a heartfelt story to tell!!

edit: here's a terrific example!!! [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alabama-law-drives- out-i...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alabama-law-drives-out-illegal- immigrants-but-also-has-unexpected- consequences/2012/06/17/gJQA3Rm0jV_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm going to downvote this article because contradicts everything said here.

</comment><comment><USER61> Forget what you and your friends experience. If we manage to get a piece of research sponsored, you'd better believe it!

Sorry, I'll go on the experiences of myself and people I trust over research/article spinning.

<comment><USER61> if my friends and I have problems with your product, it doesn't matter how reliable your research spins it as, I won't believe you. Forget research: make something my friends and I, or people I hear about, don't have problems with. That's all I pay attention to, and it works a lot better than the alternative. (paying attention to whatever you "prove" at a statistically significant level - nevermind how many commissioned studies you _don't_ publish, thereby completely invalidating that statistical significance - and ignoring anecdotes simply doesn't work, for me or anyone else.)

This article is literally asking for the right to lie (under the guises of 'research') and asking us to mod down anyone who calls them out on it. It really takes some face to say "Ignore what you experience - and vote down the experiences of others - and trust our data instead."

Next you'll sell me the most reliable cloud on the planet. All the responses on the article say they've had nothing but problems and downtime. But, I should just ignore these, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is this not based in the assumption that the article to which the anecdotes are offered as replies is omniscient? Which may in and of itself be fallacious.

<comment><USER63> The assumption is only that the article is based on a scientific study, not that it is omniscient.

<comment><USER64> A study that rigidly follows the scientific principles, but is intellectually dishonest (ie, sponsored by interested party of studied subject, etc) is often not useful to the reader of the study results. Because you can follow the letter of the principles, and still flout the spirit.

One should, when listening to a study, question the funding. Likewise, dissenting opinions must also be examined in what interested parties have a hand in their creation.

<comment><USER40> Sponsorship does not imply intellectual dishonesty. Intellectual dishonesty is a matter of how the argument is made. Sponsorship is a heuristic you could use to quickly filter papers but used as a counter-argument, it is simply ad hominem.

You are describing a method for judging arguments without thinking critically about the arguments themselves or examining their basis in evidence and that is not any kind of science. One does not find any measure of objectivity by averaging between opinions, only by holding arguments to the yardstick of rationality and evidence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


For Professor, Fury Just Beneath the Surface - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html

<comment><USER2> How did this woman not go to jail or a mental ward before this happened?

</comment><comment><USER3> The herpes-bomb (or any crazy Harvard PhD hobbyist-bioweapon) would have made for more interesting news.

Scary stuff. Someone will adapt it to film.

<comment><USER4> While a booby-trapped building might have been more "Hollywood sexy," a shooting at an University faculty meeting which kills 3 people is more interesting news than I want to hear any day of the week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!"

Wow. Just wow. Beating someone over a booster seat at Ihop. Sounds like a first class nutbar.</comment>


Plan9 has been forked: 9front - <AUTHOR> http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/news/2011/06/17/0-9front/ <comment><USER2> After having some experience trying to write portable Bourne Shell scripts, I recently came across Tom Duff's paper[1] describing the "rc" shell used by Plan 9. I was quite blown away by the number of common shell-scripting problems it solves, and the elegance of the resulting language. There's no chance of it replacing, say, Python, but I'm sorely tempted to install Plan 9 From User Space and try out rc the next time I need to script something.

[1]: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc>

<comment><USER3> I was intrigued by your comment and took a look at the rc feature list, but I couldn't see any features that aren't available in bash 3.1 and above.

This takes nothing away from rc of course, which was around when bash was a simple re-implementation of sh, and may very well have been the inspiration for some of bash's modern features. [1]

With regards to scripting, since perl/python/ruby has supplanted shell for moderate to difficult tasks, I think it's perfectly reasonable to use bash/zsh for the occasional simple shell script. Arch Linux, for example, writes rc scripts in modern bash, significantly increasing legibility (given you can read modern bash).

Even if you stick to sh for maximum portability, if you use bash/zsh as an interactive shell, I would strongly encourage diving into the man page; modern shells, for all their shell\ quoting woes, have an amazing amount of concise constructs that make life at the command line quite pleasurable.

[1]: More likely is that Korn shell is the inspiration for both

<comment><USER4> I'm not an rc expert, merely a disgruntled POSIX shell scripter, so here are some attractive rc features [1] missing from sh and bash:

> Rc captures command exit status in the variable $status. For a simple > command the value of $status is just as described above. For a pipeline > $status is set to the concatenation of the statuses of the pipeline > components with | characters for separators.

Both bash and ksh have the pipefail option, which at least makes the pipeline fail if any component fails. (Horrifyingly, POSIX sh lacks even this.) Actually seeing which component failed can be really handy. In other shells, you only get $?.

> Arbitrary file descriptors may be sent through a pipe by typing, for > example, "vc junk.c |[2] grep -v '^$'" This deletes blank lines from the C > compiler's error output.

POSIX sh, bash, and ksh can only connect stdout to stdin across a pipe. Connecting arbitrary descriptors is nice, particularly in logging applications.

> There is no need for the distinction between $* and $@. There is no need for > four types of quotation, nor the extremely complicated rules that govern > them.

How many people understand the difference between $* and $@ in POSIX sh or bash, or for instance the difference between "$@" and $@? These are critical things any POSIX shell scripter should know, yet I've met very few that actually do. One approach is to educate people about these things. Another is to avoid the need to educate them in the first place.

I like that rc cleans up quoting, which I've seen single-handedly scare developers off of shell scripting.

[1] <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc>

<comment><USER5> so you call one command and want just to know if it failed... but that command triggered a series of pipes internally, now you have to trim the status mess?

thankfully truly posix stuff doesn't have it

<comment><USER4> _but that command triggered a series of pipes internally, now you have to trim the status mess?_

No. If you run an external command from an rc script, ie the shell is doing the fork and exec for you, then $status will have a single number just like $?.

It doesn't matter if the external command is an rc script that, internally, runs a pipeline at the end. You will only get a multi-status if the previous statement within the current rc script was a pipeline. Under sh, bash, or ksh, people rarely bother to look at $? in this situation, since it's either potentially irrelevant (without -o pipefail), or you don't know which program it's from (with -o pipefail).

 _so you call one command and want just to know if it failed_

This works perfectly fine in rc:

       find . | grep '[0-9]' | wc || echo >[1=2] "number files not found"

From the rc docs:

> Any $status containing only 0's and |'s has boolean value true. Any other > status is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh no, they're taking us seriously! Quick, add more swastikas!

Heh, seriously, 9front development is done more in fun than anything else, but the 3 main developers are sufficiently talented that rapid progress is being made in several areas where most 9fans tend to struggle. Not only that but 9front's developers seem to be very good at avoiding getting bogged down in peripheral features which divert effort from the drivers and cleanups which Plan 9 really needs.

<comment><USER7> Ethan, the fun vibe of the project really shows through. I think it is inspiring and inviting. Glad to see you guys having fun with some really cool tech. Keep pushing it forward and keeping us posted!

The native Go integration was a really good move; a lot of interested cross- overs I am sure from the Go community will get into 9front because of that attractive piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see several good things on the list of new features. The rc-based boot process is definitely a good idea. I haven't had the issues with the fossil filesystem that some have, so I don't know about cwfs as the main on-disk fileserver, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. A lot of the contributors have been doing good things in the Plan 9 world for quite awhile now. A list of some of the new features is at <http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/features>

</comment><comment><USER9> The IRC channel (#cat-v on freenode) has been extra helpful and responsive. I've now got 9front mostly up and running on qemu and my T60, thanks to devs fixing drivers on the fly while I passed along screenshots of error messages. I've been interested in hacking on Plan 9 for a while but have had little luck getting it to boot before 9front (even 9atom).

A couple of years down the road, it would be delightfully perverse to end up with Plan 9 running in the server room and Linux/OSX on the devs' desktops. Maybe unlikely, but fun to consider.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here is funny artwork for 9front:

<http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/9front/>

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the first big step to actually creating an ecosystem for plan9. It's a fantastic OS, though there's not much I can do with it, unfortunately. Maybe that will change now!

</comment><comment><USER12> Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.

<comment><USER13> I'm wondering, though, what use would Google make of P9? I guess it might make a great fit with Go.

<comment><USER14> Maybe it's not reasonable now or ever but I'd quite love to think of Google as a company capable of doing things that are immensely interesting but have no obvious, immediate, practical "use."

I don't know if they are there quite yet. It seems to me that they still strongly incentivize shipping products and making things people will use within in their corporate culture. I might be wrong. There could be a light coming on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/Mascot>

lol

<comment><USER7> haha, I love the vibe of the project. Seems like a fun team. I do miss Glenda though. Getting someone to color her in would have been a good mascot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why the fork?

<comment><USER16> Someone told me on IRC that Plan9's maintaners can't keep up with the work and they don't accept much help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the significance of the name "9front"?

<comment><USER2> The linked web-page spells out the full name as "Plan 9 from the People's Front of cat-v.org" - perhaps a reference to the "Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea" split described in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh boy! So now instead of one going nowhere OS, there are two going nowhere OSes, only with one going nowhere slightly faster.

<comment><USER7> It takes no effort to be a wet blanket; all you have to do is lie there, covered in water, and drown out anyone else trying to do anything.

How many emails/comments/posts EXACTLY like what you just wrote happened in 1991?

No one is saying what Plan9 will or won't become, but that also means _you_ have no idea where it is going in 10 years or what fun innovations will come out of it.

Don't make a habit of shitting on people thinking outside the box, you'll miss a lot of interesting things.

</comment></comment><comment> muuh-gnu Does the fork still have the same de facto non-free license that plagued Plan9?

<comment><USER19> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#License></comment></comment>


Show HN: BetaQ | Build Hype Around Your Launch (startup weekend boulder team) - <AUTHOR> http://betaq.co

<comment><USER2> Very interesting concept. You could extend this to allow site owners to filter through the beta list by certain areas or other metrics and grant access accordingly. Prioritizing by a simple list may not work as well, as it might be a bit depressing knowing you're 1,000,000th in line.</comment>


The Spirit of the 1914 Christmas Truce - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-spirit-of-the-1914-christmas-truce-1419006906

<comment><USER2> The key assumption here was the soldiers considered themselves "bitter foes". I'm not sure this was the case. It required "court martial" \-- ie. throwing soldiers against the wall and shooting them -- to resume the fighting in some cases.

I think that anyone who lived for more than a couple of weeks on the Western front came to the realization that the people engaged in the fight had more in common than not. The officers and rear echelon folks shot thousands of their fellow countrymen who cracked under the pressure of constant bombardment and death.

So as a soldier or junior officer, you faced certain death both in front of you and behind you. Survival meant huddling for warmth in a fetid hole. Those poor bastards were cogs in a murder machine -- the only "golden ticket" was losing a limb.

<comment><USER3> That was my first thought when I read the title. The article itself is more nuanced:

> But otherwise, soldiers on both sides were likely to think that the more > formidable Them was the rats and lice, the mold in the food, the cold or the > comfortable officer at headquarters who seemed, in the words of one soldier, > an "abstract tactician who from far away disposes of us."

> But in studying diaries and letters, Mr. Ashworth observed surprisingly > little hostility toward the enemy expressed by trench soldiers; the further > from the front, the more hostility. In the words of one front-line soldier, > "At home one abuses the enemy, and draws insulting caricatures. How tired I > am of grotesque Kaisers. Out here, one can respect a brave, skillful, and > resourceful enemy. They have people they love at home, they too have to > endure mud, rain and steel."

I believe a goal of the essay is to have the reader start from the idea that the soldiers were "bitter foes", only to show, through evidence, that that wasn't the case, and that there are good reasons for what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The classic book on this truce is Stanley Weintraub's Silent Night:

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00311JUGK](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00311JUGK)

And don't miss the Sainsbury's ad in the WSJ article, if you have some kleenex handy.

Also, from the comments in the article I learned of the fascinating story of Capt. Robert Campbell, who was captured by the Germans during WWI. When word arrived at the POW camp that his mother was dying, the Kaiser gave him a two- week leave to visit his dying mother, on the condition he return afterward. Out of a sense of duty, he returned as promised. And out of a continuing sense of duty, he immediately tried to escape!

[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23957605](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23957605)

<comment><USER5> Also, a very good satirical look at WWI was 'Blackadder Goes Forth', with Rowan Atkinson (I.e. Mr Bean actor), Hugh Laurie (House) and Stephen Fry (QI). Utter genius comedy with a very dark undertone.

It is a very British humour though. I'm not sure if it travels well?

<comment><USER6> I am certain it travels well. Black Adder is right up there with Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The informal truces of the First World War amaze me whenever I read about it. I have similar feelings when I read about the widespread dissent by US troops during the Vietnam War, ranging from Search And Avoid missions, to the "flattop revolts" and suspected sabotage of Navy ships.

The bitterest foes for the troops don't seem to be the enemy troops, but the politicians and upper staff, who offer the certainty of punishment and slander of dishonor, while the enemy troops offer only the chance of death or injury.

If true, I begin to understand why John Kiriakou, the only CIA agent jailed because the US decided to torture people, is a whistleblower and not one of the government torturers, including those that authorized the program. That sort of power structure requires that the authorities be able to be worse to its own people than what the enemy will do.

<comment><USER7> I learned from one of James C. Scott's books that there was a "Memorial to the Unknown Deserter" created in Bonn, Germany, but local authorities prevented it from being set up there and it eventually ended up in Potsdam.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserteurdenkmal_%28Bonn/Potsd...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserteurdenkmal_%28Bonn/Potsdam%29)

The human figure is formed from the negative space cut out of the stone. (The inscription from Kurt Tucholsky translates as "Here lived a man / who refused / to shoot at his fellow men. / Honor to his memory.")

The German Wikipedia identifies a large number of similar memorials:

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahnenflucht#Denkmale_f.C3.BCr...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahnenflucht#Denkmale_f.C3.BCr_Deserteure)

Although some of them have been extraordinarily controversial in Germany (and Austria), they do exist; it's hard for me to imagine a similar memorial in the U.S.

<comment><USER3> Nice, and the negative space is good use of symbolism.

I know of nothing like that in the US. The only references I found ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertion) and [http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/27/memorial- day-2/](http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/27/memorial-day-2/) ) were for Germany and Austria.

A-ha! I found one; "a statue commemorating American draft dodgers and the Canadians who took them in." [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british- columbia/war-resisters...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/war- resisters-statue-finds-a-home-1.627046) . The image link is broken, but archive.org has it as [https://web.archive.org/web/20060113173812/http://vancouver....](https://web.archive.org/web/20060113173812/http://vancouver.cbc.ca/gfx/Vancouver/photos/040923_resister3.jpg) . I can't make much sense of the image though.

Many groups in the US opposed the statue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> UEFA also created a powerful piece [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYv6dHy5TJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYv6dHy5TJE)

</comment><comment><USER9> Rather than assuming that these soldiers negotiated truces out of purely pragmatic reasons, I think the article completely ignores that most people actually don't want to lie half-frozen in trenches killing each other. They had these "truces" because war is hell and everybody wanted a break from it. If there was nobody there to order them, most would've gone home.

<comment><USER3> How does it ignore that?

It gave examples of how shelling didn't occur during wartime, and how latrines and food trains weren't targeted, because people wanted food, wanted to eat in peace, and need to take a crap - and if they did it then the other side would respond in kind.

I guess I'm confused about how "everybody wanted a break from it" isn't a pragmatic reason.

But the essay continues: "Initially, this was a purely instrumental impulse, self-serving cooperation to prevent retaliation." (I think that's your 'purely pragmatic'.) Followed by:

> With time, however, this sense of responsibility developed a moral tinge, > tapping into the soldiers' resistance to betraying those who dealt honorably > with them. It occurred to them that: The other side didn't want dinner > disturbed any more than we do; they also don't want to fight in rainstorms; > they also have to deal with brass from headquarters who screw up everything. > A creeping sense of camaraderie emerged.

I can't help but think that the essay takes on your point whole-heartedly, and doesn't ignore it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The philosopher Daniel Dennett has pondered a revealing scenario: Someone is undergoing surgery without anesthesia but with absolute knowledge that afterward, she would receive a drug that would erase all memories of the event. Would the pain be less agonizing if she knew that it would be forgotten?"

I've only been under anesthesia once, when I had my wisdom teeth out. A few days beforehand I was struck with this same thought - what if they anesthetics simply paralysed you, rendering you unable to respond to pain, while temporarily interfering with your ability to form new memories? What if all the pain was experienced in full, and you were simply unable to remember it afterwards? How could anyone know the difference? This made the few days prior to surgery very uncomfortable.

<comment><USER10> _What if they anesthetics simply paralysed you, rendering you unable to respond to pain, while temporarily interfering with your ability to form new memories?_

The drug Versed is supposed to do this. For example patient complaints see [http://versedbusters.blogspot.com/](http://versedbusters.blogspot.com/) and the comments on that page.

<comment><USER6> Wow. That sounds very much like a date-rape drug.</comment></comment></comment>