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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Dorikka 16 June 2013 04:45AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 June 2013 06:33:08PM 0 points [-]

I think that people who don't care about statistics are still likely to be impressed by vivid stories, not that I have any numbers to prove this.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 29 June 2013 08:32:57PM 1 point [-]

I agree. But optimizing for good storytelling is different from optimizing for good science. A good scientific result would be like: "minicamp attendees are 12% more efficient in their lives, plus or minus 3.5%". A good story would be "this awesome thing happened to an minicamp attendee" (ignoring the fact that equivalent thing happened to a person in the control group).

Maybe the best would be to publish both, and let readers pick their favourite part.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 June 2013 11:36:03PM 0 points [-]

I'm sure they'll be publishing both stories and statistics.