April 21, 2014
Reefer madness brain scan panic roundup
On the recent paper claiming brain changes from low-level cannabis use, you’ve already seen the StatsChat post (I hope)
There’s also
- Lior Pachter’s demolition of the paper itself
- Maggie Koerth-Baker points out that there was no difference in actual psychological measurements between the users and controls — the brain scan differences didn’t show up in behaviour.
- Maia Szalavitz makes similar points
- Mark Kleiman writes about the politics, and also notes that the lead author seems to be innocent (here she is, sounding sensible). The over-the-top quotes come from the last author (‘senior’ author) on the paper.
- Jacob Sullum assigns a large chunk of the blame to university publicity departments
- You can read the actual paper here
- It’s not quite Radio Yerevan, but there’s an Armenian news site that picked up the story from the Telegraph.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »