Briefly
The basic statistical question is “Compared to what?”
- Compared to what? Mark Kleiman If you ignore the benefits of [cannabis] legalization, it looks like a pretty bad idea. If you ignore the costs, it looks like a pretty good idea.
- Compared to what? What’s wrong with this comparison
- We criticize the Herald and the Fairfax papers a lot, but it could be much worse
This year, the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.
and that doesn’t include any of their science/health stories that ended up on StatsChat via the local media.
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 »