Rationality Quotes May 2013

katydee

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

A couple of years ago, a meta-analysis of RCTs found that taking aspirin daily reduces the risk of dying from cancer by ~20% in middle-aged and older adults.

That's a curious metric to choose. By that standard taking aspirin is about as healthy as playing a round of Russian Roulette.

I'd assume they mean something like the per-year risk of dying from cancer conditional on previous survival -- if they indeed mean the total lifetime risk of dying from cancer I agree it's ridiculous.

3satt12y

It's a fairly natural metric to choose if one wishes to gauge aspirin's effect on cancer risk, as the study's authors did. [...] Fortunately, the study's authors and I also interpreted the data by another standard. Daily aspirin reduced all-cause mortality, and didn't increase non-cancer deaths (except for "a transient increase in risk of vascular death in the aspirin groups during the first year after completion of the trials"). These are not results we would see if aspirin effected its anti-cancer magic by a similar mechanism to Russian Roulette.

1Alicorn12y

Am I missing a subtlety here, or is it just that cancer is usually one of those things that you hope to live long enough to get?

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Rationality Quotes May 2013

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Rationality Quotes May 2013

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