"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, fast-acting, painful cancers. That's not a 'really obvious' statement - it's very far from an obvious statement - but "my grandfather is still alive, in no pain and walking eight miles a day, when six months ago he was given two months to live" is stronger evidence than a single unreplicated paper.
Is "my grandfather is still alive, in no pain and walking eight miles a day, when six months ago he was given two months to live" stronger evidence for vitamin C effectivity than a reviewed paper saying "we have conducted a study on 1000 patients with terminal cancer; the survival rate in the group treated with large doses of vitamin C was not greater than the survival rate in the control group"? If so, why?
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.
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