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 are. I have heard lots of statements roughly analogous to "although my doctor says otherwise, chocolate in fact cures common cold; normally it takes a weak to get rid of it, but last year I ate a lot of chocolate and was healthy in six days". Which is what the original article tries to warn against.
"While you use "one's own experience" only to denote things which are really obvious."
No, I use it to denote things I have experienced. For example, there is disagreement over whether vitamin C megadoses can help certain kinds of cancers. I've actually seen papers on both sides. However, had I only seen a single paper that said vitamin C doesn't help with cancer, I would have perfectly good grounds for dismissing it - because I have seen two people gain a significant number of QALYs from taking vitamin C when diagnosed with terminal, fa...
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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