= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChrisHallquist comments on The Statistician's Fallacy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (67)
Links?
All the stuff I've found makes the epidemiological evidence sound inconclusive, but the arguments from physics / biology seem pretty solid. But I've also heard people suggest that descriptions of the epidemeological evidence sound inconclusive because what they really mean is "if there's an effect, it's too small to detect," which scientists are afraid to say because that would also be misinterpreted. I'd really like to get clearer on this.
Querying my brain for specific sources turned up NULL, so I spent a couple of minutes on pubmed. It seems my statement was too confident.
There was a large metastudy which found some effect in a high quality subset of studies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19826127 And a commentary on it which says their definition of 'high quality' is bullshit, amongst other things: http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/28/7/e121.long
I find the criticisms in the commentary convincing, but I'd still rate their being a reasonable chance of an actual association existing, and therefore a non-negligible risk of an actual causal relationship as opposed to just some confound. I invite anyone who likes this sort of thing to give it a little more time.