4 ms·

Explain that to the layman in a way the entire Internet will understand. Until you can ... they are for all intents and purposes.

• gmfawcett 8y ago
  Hardly equivalent "for all intents and purposes." The purposes of the layman are nothing like those of the research community.
  • geggam 8y ago
    If you put it in the public domain it is your responsibility to ensure it is digestible by the audience you publish it to. So yes... public posted information should be layman ready
    • radus 8y ago
      Do you apply this reasoning to articles or comments discussing kernel development? Some topics have higher irreducible complexity than others. More importantly, I can make whatever I want public, and I can do so with whatever audience I have in mind.
      • geggam 8y ago
        Interesting. So inciting panic online is fine but not in a theater ?
        • metaphor 8y ago
          Your remark finds difficulty in satisfying clear and present danger.
          • geggam 8y ago
            Vaccine studies
            • metaphor 8y ago
              ...are of a certain irreducible complexity which undergo a process of peer review prior to publication in scientific journals, and rightfully presume a minimum prerequisite background for proper interpretation? I'm sure the topic and its meta are interesting to the professional audience in which they were intended for.
    • Intermernet 8y ago
      Emphatically, no, it's not. Putting something in the public domain allows other people with knowledge in the field to use the information. It doesn't mean that the lay-person should be able to digest it. The public domain isn't some lowest common denominator clearing house of information, it's just public.
  • gaius 8y ago
    The purposes of the layman are nothing like those of the research community. The "laymen" are the ones funding all of this through their taxes. I'm sure scientists would love it if the plebs just shut up and kept on giving them money, but it doesn't work like that. In fact that is why it is becoming harder and harder for scientists to communicate with the public to affect policy.
• radus 8y ago
  I'm a graduate student in the biomedical sciences. I perform scientific studies and occasionally publish in peer reviewed journals. I am not a clinician, and I do not run clinical trials. Clinical trials are not basic research, though they rely on a great body of basic research, and are themselves experiments. Requiring that clinical studies have clearly defined end points serves the purpose of ensuring that the results are robust and well understood. This is important because the end goal of a clinical trial is developing a treatment of some sort that will go into many humans, and mistakes can be very harmful. Choosing an appropriate endpoint for a clinical trial can also be very challenging. Say for example you're trying to advance a drug candidate for treating cardiovascular disease. You have many choices for how to measure that - chest pain, resting heartrate, cholesterol etc. It's very much possible that your drug does improve cardiovascular health, but your trial can fail because you chose the wrong endpoint. When I perform an experiment, I do so with a hypothesis which is sometimes proven right, and sometimes proven wrong. Either way, the results can be interesting and form pieces of the large puzzle that is a scientific study. Further, questions that are addressed in a scientific study are generally going to be more broad than those addressed in a clinical trial - we don't really do exploratory clinical trials, but exploratory research is a very important part of science. For these sorts of studies, it is often difficult or impossible to have a well defined endpoint such as is required in a clinical trial. One example for you: I hypothesize that enzyme X has function Y. During my studies, I discover that enzyme X actually has function W! If the evidence I present for enzyme X having function W is solid, my results can still be great and useful, even if my initial hypothesis was wrong.
• jmts 8y ago
  "Clinical trials are a type of scientific study. The studies shown in the article are of a particular type, and don't represent all studies, much like cows don't represent all farm animals. There may be similar cases across the remainder of science, but this case cannot be used to show that this is true, in the same way cows producing milk cannot be used to show that chickens produce milk. "A reasonable takeaway from this article is that any one scientific study may contain flaws, or show bias, and therefore there is a possibility for it to be confirmed, improved, or disproven in the future. As a result, it is better to take early results with a grain of salt until additional supporting evidence is found, than to take them as gospel. "It should be noted that these results are due to flaws in the scientific establishment, flaws in the human application of science, and flaws in the humans themselves, but not the scientific method itself. The scientific method itself is sound and can be trusted. You use it every day to see whether the water in your shower is too hot or cold, or whether it is raining outside."
  • profalseidol 8y ago
    Maybe we should have some good metric showing how small the sample size is compared to the whole. And maybe make it a rule to add 'Approximation' in the title if it uses that.
    • pimmen 8y ago
      Possible sources of skew is more interesting. Larger, skewed samples can be far worse than smaller, randomized ones.
      • Fomite 8y ago
        This is the source of a classic exam question given by Ken Rothman, an epidemiologist: As sample size goes up, the probability that an estimate's confidence interval contains the true value of an effect goes.. A) Up B) Down
        • pimmen 8y ago
          Thanks for the reference! Very interesting Twitter discussion that sparked. :)