Tag Archives: statistics

That Chocolate Study

Several of you asked me to write about that chocolate article that went viral recently. From I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How: “Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found … Continue reading

Beware Summary Statistics

Last night I asked Tumblr two questions that had been bothering me for a while and got some pretty good answers. I. First, consider the following paragraph from JRank: Terrie Moffitt and colleagues studied 4,552 Danish men born at the … Continue reading

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Growth Mindset 4: Growth Of Office

Previously In Series: No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet // I Will Never Have The Ability To Clearly Explain My Beliefs About Growth Mindset // Growth Mindset 3: A Pox On Growth Your Houses Last month I criticized a recent paper, … Continue reading

Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Perversities

[WARNING: I am not a pharmacologist. I am not a researcher. I am not a statistician. This is not medical advice. This is really weird and you should not take it too seriously until it has been confirmed] I. I’ve … Continue reading

Effective Altruists: Not As Mentally Ill As You Think

During my recent meetings with effective altruist groups here, I kept hearing the theory that effective altruism selects for people with mental disorders. The theory is that people with a lot of depression, anxiety, and self-hatred turn to effective altruism … Continue reading

How Likely Are Multifactorial Trends?

Vox recently wrote about 16 Theories For Why Crime Plummeted In The US. Their story is based on a report by the Brennan Center For Justice, which I haven’t read, so I’m hesitant to critique it too much. The little … Continue reading

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Drug Testing Welfare Users Is A Sham, But Not For The Reasons You Think

Some people say the War on Drugs is ‘unwinnable’. But there’s actually a foolproof solution that cures drug addiction approximately 100% of the time. That solution is – put people on welfare in Tennessee. Or at least that is what … Continue reading

The Efficacy Of Everything In Psychiatry In One Graph Plus Several Pages Of Dense But Necessary Explanation

Shamelessly stolen from my hospital’s Journal Club: Huhn et al (2014) graph the Efficacy Of Pharmacotherapy And Psychotherapy For Adult Psychiatric Disorders, and it looks like this: Before anything else – we kind of have to assume that in each … Continue reading

Perceptions Of Required Ability Act As A Proxy For Actual Required Ability In Explaining The Gender Gap

I. I briefly snarked about Leslie et al (2015) last week, but I should probably snark at it more rigorously and at greater length. This is the paper that concludes that “women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that … Continue reading

Depression Is Not A Proxy For Social Dysfunction

I. Here is a terrible article from the New York Post: Sorry, Liberals, Scandinavian Countries Aren’t Utopias. Its thesis is interesting and worth exploring, but instead of a principled investigation, the article just publishes a bunch of cherry-picked smears about … Continue reading