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PhilGoetz comments on The Universal Medical Journal Article Error - Less Wrong
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Comments (189)
What do you mean by your second sentence?
For example, in messy topics like biology, most instances of "all" should be replaced with "most". In other words, people were translating the universal statements into probabilistic statements. They were subsequently confused when you insisted on treating the problem as logical rather than statistical.
This seems to be a very common nerd argument failure mode.
What is the antecedent of "this"? This isn't a rhetorical question, I honestly can't figure out which of several possibilities you're referring to.
responding to claims as if they are meant literally or arguments as if they're deductive logical arguments.
It is because it is a statistical problem that you can't replace "all" with "most". The F-value threshold was calculated assuming "all", not "most". You'd need a different threshold if you don't mean "all".
Also, the people I am complaining about explicitly use "all" when they interpret medical journal articles in which a test for an effect was failed as having proven that the effect does not exist for any patients.