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?
No, because without knowing how likely people are to die of colon cancer without eating chocolate, I would have no idea if that contradicted or confirmed my own experience. Which suggests to me that rather than being more reliable on average than one's own experience, the average paper is, in fact, talking about things that are outside the normal person's day to day experience. But in those rare cases when a single paper contradicts something I've seen myself, then I would have no problem at all in saying it's wrong.
Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Fable of Science and Politics, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.