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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.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.
Again, the original point McArdle is making is that "consistent with zero" is just completely not what the proponents expected beforehand, and they should update accordingly. See my discussion with TheOtherDave, below. A small effect may, indeed, be worth pursuing. But here we have a case where something fairly costly was done after much disagreement, and the proponents claimed that there would be a large effect. In that case, if you find a small effect, you ought not to say "Well, it's still worth doing"; that's not what you said before. It was claimed that there would be a large effect, and the program was passed on this basis. It is then dishonest to turn around and say "Ok, the effect is small but still worthwhile". This ignores the inertia of political programs.
Most Medicaid proponents did not have expectations about the statistical results of this particular study. They did not make predictions about confidence intervals and p values for these particular analyses. Rather, they had expectations about the actual benefit of Medicaid.
You cite Ezra Klein as someone who expected that Medicaid would drastically reduce mortality; Klein was drawing his numbers from a report which estimated that in the US "137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 20... (read more)