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How are you getting food poisoning often enough to draw statistical conclusions from it?
by zeroer 9y ago
How are you getting food poisoning often enough to draw statistical conclusions from it?
- lacampbell 9y agoI never drew any statistical conclusions. I literally prefaced it with "anecdotally", to make it clear to everyone it was an anecdote.
- Dylan16807 9y agoLet me reword the question. Are you actually getting food poisoning enough that you can say how often it happens in each place? Even as an anecdote, you need a bunch of data points to calculate a rate of food poisoning. (And if your answer is yes, why are you getting so much more food poisoning than others?) An anecdote like "I only got food poisoning once and it was at X" works fine with one data point. But rates need several data points.
- ethbro 9y agoFor what it's worth, a week of eating nothing but Bangkok street food left me feeling better than a week of eating in European or American restaurants. (X = ~32)
- Dylan16807 9y agoI'm not sure if "feeling better" actually says anything about the food safety.
- ethbro 9y agoDon't let the good get in the way of the perfect. People griped about small sample size. I was adding mine. In lieu of a bacteria count and kitchen audit, I feel like eating a lot of something and feeling good is a decent proxy for "Thing is safe to eat."
- Dylan16807 9y agoIf you were eating the same kind of food in both places, it's a semi-decent proxy. But most american/european restaurants are serving a completely different kind of food than bangkok street vendors. That's an enormous confounding factor, and how good you feel is quite likely from meal composition and unrelated to safety.
- vacri 9y agoYou need to be careful of the "holiday effect" with these kinds of comparisons. It's ruined many a biology paper...
- lacampbell 9y agoI'm actually teaching myself statistics right now, but it's early stages yet. Does "anecdote" have some formal meaning? I meant it in the sense of "here's my personal experience, that I have not quantified at all".
- Dylan16807 9y agoThat sounds fine for a definition of anecdote. But I'm making an argument about the definition of "more often". Even when talking about personal experience, without real statistics, you need a certain amount of data before you can say anything about often-ness/rate.
- matt4077 9y agoIf you're in a class, you will soon hear the overused phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data". You can out-smartass them by replying "Actually, it is". An anecdote is a single data point. It's usually dismissed for all sorts of reasons, many of them valid. BUT: contrary to popular opinion, they can be interesting, or even significant, depending on your priors, the payoffs of different outcomes etc. It's become fashionable to repeat the lazy phrase above, similar to "correlation does not prove causation", or "a survey with n=<any number> is completely worthless". Example: "I've never seen this tree before. I wonder if those fruits are edible" / "It's just an anecdote, but my father ate one of those, started throwing up 30min later, and died the same day".
- summerdown2 9y ago> If you're in a class, you will soon hear the overused phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data". > You can out-smartass them by replying "Actually, it is". I don't think it is. The plural of anecdote is probably something more like "a lot of single points without any care taken to correct for variables." To get real data there needs to be a lot than just more anecdotes. There needs to be careful measurement, followed by correction for a lot of other factors. Here's one example: "I've never seen this tree before. I wonder if those fruits are edible" "It's just an anecdote, but my father ate one of those, started throwing up 30min later, and died the same day." "What did he do before that?" "Oh, he swam the dirty river, then started playing with that striped snake over there. He was a brave man, what with his heart problems and the cancer."