4 ms·
Fair enough, and my bad for not using the term statistical significance correctly. But we agree that it's entirely possible to have statistical significance tha
by eloff 11y ago
Fair enough, and my bad for not using the term statistical significance correctly. But we agree that it's entirely possible to have statistical significance that's completely meaningless. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. This is especially true for health studies, and very common with studies that show so-called gender differences when what's really happening is the variation among individuals of a single gender is larger than the detected variation between sexes. Then a result with a small sample size is really just noise and an attempt to publish a paper for the sake of publishing a paper by some academics with questionable competence or morals (or both.)
- SamReidHughes 11y agoYes. I would expect the typical health study like this with 12 subjects to be weak. It's quite possible (possible) for this one not to be weak is because it involves DNA, which is a highly dimensional thing. For example, if they set out to look at the (large) set of genes with property S and see what proportion of those had property P for all women and not-P for all men or vice versa, and found a result like, 50% of these genes are like this... At that point you know this made-up result is not luck, there absolutely is something different about these people. (But it is possible it just so happens all the men in the study ate Froot Loops as a kid, and all the women didn't, and that's the cause of all this.)