3 ms·
Somewhat unintuitively the statistics in trials don’t require a 50/50 split.
by Closi 6y ago
Somewhat unintuitively the statistics in trials don’t require a 50/50 split.
- lisper 6y agoHere is an extreme example: suppose you are an HIV skeptic who believes that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus but rather by drugs [1]. How large a study would you need to falsify your hypothesis? Answer: one HIV-positive subject, left untreated, would be enough, if that person were otherwise healthy. If that person died of AIDS, that would leave one of two possibilities: 1. HIV causes AIDS, or 2. Something else causes AIDS and that person JUST HAPPENED to have that other causal factor AND a (harmless) HIV infection. The odds of #2 are low (because AIDS and HIV infections are both uncommon) so that just leaves the first possibility. As a side-note, that experiment was actually done by an HIV skeptic, on both herself and her unfortunate daughter [2]. Needless to say, both are now dead. [1] http://duesberg.com/ http://duesberg.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maggiore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maggiore