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"Much other advice is just one person’s opinion, or useless clichés." This article is similar to just that: useless clichés. I clicked to read more about the e
by adamredwoods 10y ago
"Much other advice is just one person’s opinion, or useless clichés."
This article is similar to just that: useless clichés. I clicked to read more about the evidence backing up each item, but it's only in the footnotes? In other words, the footnotes are MUCH more interesting than the article.
- iandanforth 10y agoAgreed, mostly worthless fluff. I'd challenge the authors to remove any reference to a study that has insufficient power or that has not been replicated.
- BenjaminTodd 10y agoWe mainly rely on review papers, meta-analysis and expert consensus, rather than single unpowered studies. However, you don't need to have strong evidence behind a technique for it to be worth trying – if the upside is high enough or the costs are low enough, it could still be worth it.
- roel_v 10y ago"However, you don't need to have strong evidence behind a technique for it to be worth trying – if the upside is high enough or the costs are low enough, it could still be worth it." Well yeah but there's literally 1000's of books like that on Amazon - if yours isn't different, then why bother?
- steve_b 10y agoIf you're talking about self-help books, the ones I've seen are usually one or two page ideas which are crammed with filler. This webpage seems to be much more dense with information.
- BenjaminTodd 10y agoIf the evidence is in the footnotes (and further reading) then doesn't that mean it's not useless cliches?
- ckastner 10y agoYou concede yourself that some of the evidence is weak. To me, this does reduce at least some of the advice to useless clichés, and waters down the overall claim to being "evidence-based" as a whole.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWhen the only evidence that's available is weak, it's still better to have that than no evidence at all.
- ckastner 10y agoWeak evidence can more easily lead you on the wrong path. To be fair, the article acknowledges this, and addresses "potential upside", "cost of trying", and so on. Nevertheless, my subjective feeling is still that potentially strong arguments are being watered down by weaker arguments. I believe I would have responded better had these been split into separate articles.
- kolinko 10y agoAs much as I like science, weak evidence can point only to further research avenues. Also, it's good to understand the limitations of the scientific process.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI have a feeling people think that evidence is a binary thing. It's not. Evidence is a floating point value. That is, you can formulate some hypothesis, and the job of evidence is to move probability mass around. I.e. when you have hypotheses A, B and C, each piece of evidence towards A makes you more sure of A, and less sure of B and C. Weak evidence towards A makes you weakly more sure of A, and weakly less sure of B and C. But it's still better than choosing based on a coin flip.
- henryaj 10y agoHuh? So it's all clichés - but clichés backed up by evidence?
- visakanv 10y agoPerhaps clichés are clichés because there's something true about them?
- morgante 10y ago> I clicked to read more about the evidence backing up each item, but it's only in the footnotes Uh, footnote citations for any advice are exactly what I expect when something says it's evidence-based.