
What Happened to the Hiccups? - apophasis
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/13/what-happened-to-the-hiccups/
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coldpie
This might be the stupidest article I've ever seen linked on Hacker News.

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coldtea
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...

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some1else
The article ignores the data.

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coldtea
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?

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some1else
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".

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quxpar
The stats department at columbia must be pretty strong if you can publish a
blog article where the only data cited completely disproves your point.

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coldtea
> _The stats department at columbia must be pretty strong if you can publish a
> blog article where the only data cited completely disproves your point._

Actually it does nothing of the sort, except correlation-ally. It counts
searches for hiccups online, which is close but not exactly the same to
someone getting hiccups.

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jshevek
No, the data cited is not for online searches. I expected the same, but it
goes back to the 19th century. Probably it's the frequency with which the word
appears in scanned literature, which is even farther removed from anything
relevant to blog, given the way synonym and idiom usage changes over time.

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drusepth
This is an anecdotal article that then cites a source that shows its premise
is wrong, then claims they "don't buy it".

There's nothing of scientific (or even statistical) substance here. Does the
stats department let any student post anything to their blog?

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kangnkodos
Sometimes skunks become important to kids because they are inside video games.

Take a look at Gogle trends for "red dead skunk". A lot of kids were using
Google to figure out where to find a skunk in the game Red Dead Redemption in
June 2010.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=red%20dead%20skunk)

Edit: And of course there was another spike in kid's interest in skunks in
December 2018 when RDR2 came out. Check Google trends for "rdr2 skunk".

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cableshaft
This is a joke article, right? If not the author needs to read an article on
how to support an argument. Preferably not one written by himself, since it
seems he is deficient in this skill.

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bitexploder
Apparently, “I don’t buy it” is a legit way to win an argument.

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some1else
Search volume for hiccups has tripled since 2005, eclipsing the interest in
skunks. Confusing article.

* [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=hiccups,...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=hiccups,skunks)

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tylorr
For a long time I've been able to cancel my hiccups just as they begin. I
can't do it all the time, maybe about 90% of the time. I wonder how common
this ability is.

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jokster99
This is a joke people.

