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This might be the stupidest article I've ever seen linked on Hacker News.

coldtea 7y ago
It still posits a legitimate question. Do people get hiccups as often? Perhaps people do, but I used to get them much more often as a kid, and almost not at all for the past 10-20 years (1-2 incidents). Maybe it's more prominent based on level of physical activity? Or maybe people have different chances of getting the hiccups depending on age (e.g. more often young)? Perhaps this (getting less hiccups over time) is just true for me and the author (and other random people, and not some majority). Again a question would be, why is it so? There is not stupid question, but there are stupid kneejerk refusal to ponder a case at all...
- some1else 7y ago
  The article ignores the data.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Well, that's a knee jerk reaction of the kind I was talking about. For one, the data in the graph is "searches for the word in Google". It's not about occurrences of hiccups (which is what the article is about). Hiccups could be raising or merely searches for hiccups could be (for some other reason). Second, the author posts a personal observation. 99.9999% of people on earth could have the hiccups all the time, and it wouldn't invalidate his own observation that he personally doesn't seem to get them as often. That still calls for an explanation (could just be luck, but what it is remains to be explained in some way). Third, even if we assume more searches = more hiccups, the data show something equally surprising (the inverse of what the author says is equally perplexing: why would we have more hiccups than before? And not just because more people are on the internet (and thus ask more questions), but even after internet access sort plateaued in the english speaking world, there's still substantial rise in such searches. Is that true? Would normalised (e.g. to ratio of people with internet access over time) searches data look the same? If so why?
    - some1else 7y ago
      The "mentions in literature" chart that's posted in the article is comparable to "volume of searches", because they both pertain to societal change. A data-centric evaluation of the phenomenon would focus on actual "occurrences of hiccups".

It still posits a legitimate question. Do people get hiccups as often? Perhaps people do, but I used to get them much more often as a kid, and almost not at all for the past 10-20 years (1-2 incidents). Maybe it's more prominent based on level of physical activity? Or maybe people have different chances of getting the hiccups depending on age (e.g. more often young)? Perhaps this (getting less hiccups over time) is just true for me and the author (and other random people, and not some majority). Again a question would be, why is it so? There is not stupid question, but there are stupid kneejerk refusal to ponder a case at all...

some1else 7y ago
The article ignores the data.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Well, that's a knee jerk reaction of the kind I was talking about. For one, the data in the graph is "searches for the word in Google". It's not about occurrences of hiccups (which is what the article is about). Hiccups could be raising or merely searches for hiccups could be (for some other reason). Second, the author posts a personal observation. 99.9999% of people on earth could have the hiccups all the time, and it wouldn't invalidate his own observation that he personally doesn't seem to get them as often. That still calls for an explanation (could just be luck, but what it is remains to be explained in some way). Third, even if we assume more searches = more hiccups, the data show something equally surprising (the inverse of what the author says is equally perplexing: why would we have more hiccups than before? And not just because more people are on the internet (and thus ask more questions), but even after internet access sort plateaued in the english speaking world, there's still substantial rise in such searches. Is that true? Would normalised (e.g. to ratio of people with internet access over time) searches data look the same? If so why?
  - some1else 7y ago
    The "mentions in literature" chart that's posted in the article is comparable to "volume of searches", because they both pertain to societal change. A data-centric evaluation of the phenomenon would focus on actual "occurrences of hiccups".