You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Vladimir_Golovin comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (316)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (316)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 28 January 2014 08:41:22AM *  1 point [-]

Eating a handful of nuts a day.

"Scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health came to this conclusion after analyzing data on nearly 120,000 people collected over 30 years."

"The most obvious benefit was a reduction of 29 percent in deaths from heart disease - the major killer of people in America. But we also saw a significant reduction - 11% - in the risk of dying from cancer."

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/269206.php

Comment author: RichardKennaway 28 January 2014 01:46:18PM 1 point [-]

But:

The researchers point out that the study was not designed to examine cause and effect and so cannot conclude that eating more nuts causes people to live longer.

Indeed, the study consists only of observational data, not interventional, so what causal conclusions could be drawn from it?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 31 January 2014 06:35:48AM 1 point [-]

You act like people never did a valid causal analysis of the data in the Nurses' health study.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 31 January 2014 08:04:20AM 0 points [-]

I know I overstated things. There are such things as natural experiments, having some causal information already, etc.

I'm not familiar with the Nurses' health study, and a quick google only turns up its conclusions. What methods did they use?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 31 January 2014 08:21:34AM *  1 point [-]

Sorry, there are two separate issues: the data itself (which is a big dataset where they following a big set of nurses for many years, and recorded lots of things about them), and how the data could be used to maybe get causal conclusions.

Plenty of folks at Harvard (e.g. Miguel Hernan, Jamie Robins) used this data in a sensible way to account for confounding (naturally their results are relatively low on the 'hierarchy of evidence', but still!) Trying to draw causal conclusions from observational data is 95% of modern causal inference!

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit