johnlawrenceaspden comments on The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions - Less Wrong

10 Post author: johnlawrenceaspden 14 March 2016 01:41AM

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Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 16 March 2016 06:16:41PM 0 points [-]

Oh, and I predict that the resting VO2 would be normally distributed, but with a skew towards low values, and the size of that skew should be directly related to the size of the problem.

And that low VO2 should correlate strongly with cholesterol, fatigue, blah, blah, blah.

And I've got no idea whether that's true. It's a prediction.

Comment author: Lumifer 16 March 2016 07:16:23PM *  0 points [-]

I predict that the resting VO2 would be normally distributed

Well... Technically speaking, that's impossible because normal distribution is defined on the negative infinity to positive infinity range. So there should be some kind of a bounded bell-shaped distribution, might be a truncated normal but I have no idea whether to expect heavy or light tails.

A paper reports that for the sample size of 535 people they have the mean of 241 ml/min with the standard deviation of 56.6. They have some graphs and eyeballing them the observed minimum is around 100 and the observed maximum is about 450 -- that indicates a bit of a right-hand skew. But their population is not normal, their sample is basically cardiac patients.

You can go chase the references in that paper. At least one looks promising.