Anders_H

Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Today, my paper "Is caviar a risk factor for being a millionaire?" was published in the Christmas Edition of the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). The paper is available at http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6536 but it is unfortunately behind a paywall. I am hoping to upload an open access version to a preprint server but this needs to be confirmed with the journal first. In this paper, I argue that the term "risk factor" is ambiguous, and that this ambiguity causes pervasive methodological confusion in the epidemiological literature. I argue that many epidemiological papers essentially use an audio recorder to determine whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, without being clear about which definition of "sound" they are considering. Even worse, I argue that epidemiologists often try to avoid claiming that their results say anything about causality, by hiding behind "prediction models". When they do this. they often still control extensively for "confounding", a term which only has a meaning in causal models. I argue that this is analogous to stating that you are interested in whether trees falling in the forest causes any human to perceive the qualia of hearing, and then spending your methods section discussing whether the audio recorder was working properly. Due to space constraints and other considerations, I am unable to state these analogies explicitly in the paper, but it does include a call for a taboo on the word risk factor, and a reference to Rationality: AI to Zombies. To my knowledge, this is the first reference to the book in the medical literature. I will give a short talk about this paper at the Less Wrong meetup at the MIRI/CFAR office in Berkeley at 6:30pm tonight. (I apologize for this short, rushed announcement, I was planning to post a full writeup but I was not expecting this paper to be published for another week)

67Dec 9, 2016

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

49Oct 25, 2019

Causal Inference Sequence Part 1: Basic Terminology and the Assumptions of Causal Inference

46Jul 30, 2014

Sequence Announcement: Applied Causal Inference

44Jul 30, 2014

Anders_H

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Regression by Composition

This is a linkpost for the preprint “Regression by Composition”, by Daniel Farewell, Rhian Daniel, Mats Stensrud, and myself. The paper introduces Regression by Composition (RBC): a new, modular framework for regression modelling built around the composition of group actions. The manuscript has been accepted as a discussion paper in...

Dec 26, 202513

Shall we count the living or the dead?

This is a linkpost for an entry in my Substack newsletter at https://countheliving.substack.com/p/shall-we-count-the-living-or-the . In this entry, we announce a new arXiv preprint, "Shall we count the living or the dead". This preprint builds on my earlier work that has previously been discussed on Less Wrong, and which led to...

Jun 14, 202130

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

Our paper "Effect heterogeneity and variable selection for standardizing causal effects to a target population" has just been publised in the European Journal of Epidemiology at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-019-00571-w . While the journal's version of record is behind a paywall, a preprint is available on arXiv at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.00068.pdf. This paper argues for...

Oct 25, 201949

Counterfactual outcome state transition parameters

Today, my paper "The choice of effect measure for binary outcomes: Introducing counterfactual outcome state transition parameters" has been published in the journal Epidemiologic Methods. The version of record is behind a paywall until December 2019, but the final author manuscript is available as a preprint at arXiv. This paper...

Jul 27, 201837

The New Riddle of Induction: Neutral and Relative Perspectives on Color

Nelson Goodman's "New Riddle of Induction" has previously been discussed on Less Wrong at http://lesswrong.com/lw/8fq/bayes and http://lesswrong.com/lw/mbr/grue . Briefly, this riddle shows that any attempt to make future predictions by generalizing from past observations, may depend on arbitrary aspects of the reasoner's language. This is illustrated in the context of...

Dec 2, 20176

Odds ratios and conditional risk ratios

Jan 25, 20178

Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Dec 9, 201667

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Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

Causal Inference Sequence Part 1: Basic Terminology and the Assumptions of Causal Inference

Sequence Announcement: Applied Causal Inference

Anders_H

Regression by Composition

Shall we count the living or the dead?

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

Counterfactual outcome state transition parameters

The New Riddle of Induction: Neutral and Relative Perspectives on Color

Odds ratios and conditional risk ratios

Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Regression by Composition

Shall we count the living or the dead?

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

Counterfactual outcome state transition parameters

The New Riddle of Induction: Neutral and Relative Perspectives on Color

Odds ratios and conditional risk ratios

Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Effect heterogeneity and external validity in medicine

Causal Inference Sequence Part 1: Basic Terminology and the Assumptions of Causal Inference

Sequence Announcement: Applied Causal Inference