A single peer-reviewed paper is still not more evidence than one's own experiences. If a paper were published tomorrow, no matter how well peer-reviewed, saying, say, "chocolate is immediately lethal to humans" I would have ample reason to dismiss that, as I have seen many examples of people eating chocolate and not immediately dying. Were that paper replicated many times over, however, I'd have to start wondering about what was causing the discrepancy. But with one paper? Defy the data.
If the claim of the paper is so much extraordinary as your example, then it is very probably bullshit. But on average papers tend to be more reliable than one's own experiences. After all, there aren't many peer-reviewed papers about immediate lethality of chocolate out there, so the analogy is somewhat stretched. If a single paper claimed that chocolate increases the risk of dying from colon cancer by 5%, but all chocolate lovers you personally knew were absolutely healthy, would you also defy the data?
Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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