3 ms·
Running controlled experiments that can actually draw causal relationships is extremely expensive. Nobody has figured out how to structure economic incentives
by smallgovt 8y ago
Running controlled experiments that can actually draw causal relationships is extremely expensive.
Nobody has figured out how to structure economic incentives to motivate and fund this expensive research.
You basically need to pay large swaths of ppl to change their diet/exercise for years...for the worse.
- nradov 8y agoThe diet/exercise habits of large swaths of people are already so bad that you could hardly make them worse. The trouble lies in gathering accurate data about them (did he drink 1 or 2 bottles of Mountain Dew yesterday?), and in controlling for all the confounding factors such as genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
- smallgovt 8y agoSpecifically for exercise, I think there's a viscous cycle where once you become unhealthy, it becomes much harder to exercise. So, it's unclear which direction the causation runs. How can you remove this self-selection bias and prove the direction of the causal relationship without paying healthy people to not exercise?