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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.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.
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.
Pardon me. Mentioning only curiosity was politeness. The more significant meanings I would supplement with are 'naive or suspicious'. By itself that metric really is worthless and reading this kind of health claim should set off warning bells. Lost purposes are a big problem when it comes to medicine. Partly because it is hard, mostly because there is more money in the area than nearly anywhere else.
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