4 ms·

If the evidence is in the footnotes (and further reading) then doesn't that mean it's not useless cliches?

• ckastner 9y ago
  You 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 9y ago
    When the only evidence that's available is weak, it's still better to have that than no evidence at all.
    • ckastner 9y ago
      Weak 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 9y ago
      As 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 9y ago
        I 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.