Stat of the Summer Competition Winner!

Thank you for all the fantastic Stat of the Summer nominations.

Congratulations to Jonathan Goodman for winning a copy of Tufte’s book “Beautiful Evidence” whose nomination explained and neatly summarised the NZ Herald article “Women with more sex partners turn to drink and drugs”:

“The title and the first paragraphs make the statements that the more promiscuous you have been in the past, the more likely you are now to be dependent on drugs and alcohol. That being promiscuous causes dependency.

“Women who averaged more than 2.5 sexual partners a year in the years leading up to each interview with the researchers were 10 times as likely as women who had only one or no sexual partners a year to be clinically dependent on alcohol or drugs at age 21. They were seven times as likely by age 26 and 17 times as likely by age 32, even after allowing for all other factors in their lives.”

The increase in likelihood of dependence as the number of years of promiscuity increases is seen as evidence that promiscuity causes alcohol and drug dependence.

However the article then paraphrases the researches by saying “The researchers said the link between the number of partners and later substance dependence might be due to the “shared context” of drinking and meeting people in bars, or to both behaviours being related to underlying risk-taking attitudes.”

While the author of the article claims in the title that researchers have found that promiscuous activities drives people to drink and drugs, all the researchers have found out is that there is a correlation between the two. As we all know Correlation does not imply Causation.”

Thank you to everyone who took part and we are now resuming our weekly competition, so please keep your nominations coming in!