
If your results are highly counterintuitive - luu
http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/114728408943/if-your-results-are-highly-counterintuitive
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slyall
..then call the lab's publicist and get your paper out as quickly as possible.

This is where those "A Pepperoni Pizza per day prevents Cancer" headlines come
from.

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blackle
Funny, in pure mathematics the opposite is true. Examples of intuition defying
theorems include the Banach–Tarski paradox, cantor sets, uncountability of the
reals, gabriel's horn, the list goes on.

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sytelus
Pretty much every great result in Physics had been counter-intuitive: Gravity,
relativity, quantum mech, nuclear physics, semi-conductors, super
conductors... I'd say every major advance is science destroyed some
conventional wisdom and proved previous intuition wrong.

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davidgerard
Yes, but "counter-intuitive" _means_ "probably wrong."

There are many great results that are counter-intuitive, but there are vastly
more _completely stupid_ ideas that are counter-intuitive. Ask any academic
about their green ink file.

 _Most new ideas are bad_. That doesn't mean "give them a serious look", but
it does mean "though you probably won't get far with them."

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pluma
What is a "green ink file"? Google isn't helping.

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davidgerard
A British journalistic term for the frothing of lunatics; may or may not
actually be written in green.
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Green_ink](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Green_ink)
Academics tend to get a lot of correspondence from cranks, often enough to
accumulate a collection.

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rasz_pl
Its like author rediscovered Survivorship bias on his own :)

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simonbyrne
To me, these examples vividly illustrate the limitations of working with
observational data, and are an extension of the standard "correlation vs
causation" problem.

I think the pertinent lesson here is that these are still very real problems
in the world of "big data": just because you're map-reducing, and throwing
around petabytes of data, what you can learn is still limited by the regime
under which the data were collected.

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amag
Interesting, I wonder if not the latest Spotify Insight is exactly a case of
this: [https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/04/22/music-taste-
matur...](https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/04/22/music-taste-matures-by-
age-35-and-its-different-for-parents/#more-1476)

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formulaT
Endogeneity is not unique to big data. If your results are counterintuitive,
it could be because of endogeneity, or your data is just generally messed up,
or more subtle statistical issues. Or maybe your analysis is right.

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waterisnewcloud
This kind of thinking often promotes confirmation biases.

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late2part
For a counter-example, consider quantum mechanics.

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tbrownaw
"Intuitive" means "consistent with prior experience".

If that prior experience is using a prism in a box to take the spectrum of the
sun or various kinds of electric lights, and then studying where the bright
and dark bands come from? Or shining a laser pointer at a hair to see the
diffraction pattern?

Well, playing with that stuff for fun means that a lot of the QM stuff doesn't
seem nearly as bizarre as it's said to be.

But then, heavier-than-air flying machines were for a while considered
_impossible_ , rather than merely counterintuitive. And now you can get kits
to make small ones at the toy store.

