Something I generally keep in mind about articles posted to HN:<p>A large portion of the HN audience really, really wants to think they're smarter than mostly everyone else, including most experts. Very few are. I'm certainly not.<p>Articles which "debunk" some commonly held belief, especially those wrapped in what appears to be an understandable, logical, followable argument, are going to be cat nip here.<p>Articles like this are even stronger cat nip. If a member of the HN audience wants to believe they're mostly smarter than mostly everyone else, that includes other members of the HN audience.<p>So, whenever I read an article and come away thinking that, having read the article, I'm suddenly smarter than a huge number of experts, especially if, like the original article, it's because I understand "this one simple trick!", I immediately discard that knowledge and forget I read it.<p>If the article is right, it will be debated and I'll see more articles about it, and it'll generate sufficient echoes in the right caves of the right experts. Once it does, I can change my view then.<p>I am not a statistician, or a research scientist. I have no idea which author is right. But, my spider sense says that if dozens of scientific papers, written by dozens of people who are, failed to notice their "effect" was just some mathematical oddity, that'd be pretty incredible.<p>And incredible things require incredible evidence. And a blog post rarely, if ever, meets that standard.