MrShaggy comments on Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 April 2009 06:52PM

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Comment author: MrShaggy 28 April 2009 01:50:05AM 2 points [-]

Unreliable for what purpose? I would think that for any individual's purpose, self-experimentation is the ONLY standard that counts... it's of no value to me if a medicine is statistically proven to work 99% of the time, if it doesn't work for ME.

The way I'd put it for this stuff is that experiments help communicate why someone would try a technique, they help people distinguish signal from noise, because there are a ton of people out there saying X works for me.