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.
It seems that we are using the phrase "one's own experience" in a different way. If I knew 100 people, 20 of whom ate much more chocolate than the rest, and out of those 20 noone had colon cancer, while five of the rest had one, I would say that my personal experience tells that chocolate consumption is anticorrelated with colon cancer. While you use "one's own experience" only to denote things which are really obvious.
The problem is that most people are far less cautious when creating hypotheses from own experience than you probably ar...
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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