5 ms·
Excessively large effect sizes are a warning sign in and of themselves. A good article on this is here: [0] -- simply if the effect is too huge, it becomes inc
by jfindley 7y ago
Excessively large effect sizes are a warning sign in and of themselves. A good article on this is here: [0] -- simply if the effect is too huge, it becomes incumbent on the researcher to explain why no-one has noticed this before. Methane is a gas with a distinct and noticeable smell. Seaweed is plentiful in many places cows are kept. If the effect was really as dramatic as claimed you'd expect that it'd be well known that letting cows eat seaweed made them less smelly, and the authors of the original study make no attempt to explain why this might be the case.
0: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j...
- icxa 7y ago> "it becomes incumbent on the researcher to explain why no-one has noticed this before" Farmer: huh, we'll I'll be damned. Who in the hell woulda thought to feed them seaweed."
- VBprogrammer 7y agoIf I'm not mistaken the original inspiration for this research was precisely that farmers noticed their cattle (or perhaps it was sheep) were happier when allowed to graze in fields which happened to be along the shore, allowing them to naturally eat quantities of sea weed.
- random_savv 7y ago> Methane is a gas with a distinct and noticeable smell Methane is odorless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
- jfindley 7y agoInteresting, thank you! I was surprised by this, as it's the major component of natural gas (as used widely for cooking here), and this has a distinct smell. I went looking however, and discovered that's actually because Ethyl Mercaptan is added specifically to make it detectable by humans. I never realised this, and does indeed explain why it's plausible no-one would have noticed such a large effect.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brohee 7y agoWe add mercaptan (an horrible smelling, innocuous gas) to natural gas (methane), so we get a chance to notice leaks before an explosion.