Oooooo! Lies, More Lies, and Statistics! Time to get picky about believing what we read!

[bkoffman]

Oooooo! Lies, More Lies, and Statistics! Time to get picky about believing what we read! Let's let Dr. Susan Leclair take us on an eye-opening ride through the written words: Anecdote/ frequency/ incidence/ “it was a small study”... Ten is better than two. One thousand is better than five hundred. One million is better than one hundred thousand. This article is fun! Check it out. cllsociety.org/2021/06/lies...

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

Good to see Dr Leclair's photo accompanying her article, thanks Brian!

This is a timely piece, given our lives may depend on decisions made on the basis of small studies, or studies where the chosen study population is not representative for us.

For more fun on statistics, specifically correlation and causation, there's this paper from Robert Matthews, Aston University, Birmingham, England. robertmatthews.org/wp-conte...

From a study of 10 years of stork breeding pair data from 17 European countries, he notes "a highly statistically significant degree of correlation between stork populations and (human) birthrates...", "...where there is only a 1 in 125 chance of obtaining at least as impressive a value assuming the null hypothesis of no correlation were true."

More seriously, Why did I get CLL? Clearing up confusion between correlation and causation: healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

Neil

Stork breeding pairs and human births correlation in 17 European countries over 10 years.

[Ghounds in reply to AussieNeil]

So my Grandma was right!! Storks do bring babies 😁