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"According to Mitchell's data, bed-sharing raises her baby's risk of SIDS from about 1 in 46,000 to 1 in 16,400, or an increase of .004 percentage points." ?
by _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
"According to Mitchell's data, bed-sharing raises her baby's risk of SIDS from about 1 in 46,000 to 1 in 16,400, or an increase of .004 percentage points."
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- jaycroft 8y ago(1/16400) - (1/46000) ~= 0.00004076, or about 0.004 percentage points. Reasonable on the face - so, are you instead arguing that percentage points are misleading? I would say that they are an appropriate measure when evaluating risky alternatives. If you said, "it's three times more likely to kill by SIDS", that doesn't help if you also have a similar long tail stat such as "but it's also 10 times less likely to die of cancer due to cosmic radiation due to shielding by the mother's body!" Cool, but your baby doesn't actually have a 3x better chance of survival from the combination of the two effects. The thing that matters is death rates, and death rates are measured in percentage points, not ratios of percentages. Only with rates can we tell if we're going after low hanging fruit or making micro-optimisations that don't actually matter.
- Zhenya 8y ago1 ÷ 46000 = 0.0000217391304348 1 ÷ 16400 = 0.0000609756097561 0.0000217391304348 – 0.0000609756097561 = -0.0000392364793213 -0.0000392364793213 x 100 = -0.00392364793213 .004 Percent