January 12, 2022

Briefly

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  • Last June, the FDA approved a medication for Alzheimer’s Disease, although a lot of people, including their external advisory committee, thought there wasn’t convincing evidence that it works.  The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the organisation that would be paying for a lot of this treatment, have decided they need some randomised trials showing that the treatment is safe and effective, so they have said they will only fund the treatment in trials.
  • According to Pew Research, “Overall, about half of U.S. adults (48%) say that most things in society can be clearly divided into good and evil, while the other half (50%) say that most things in society are too complicated to be categorized this way.” This is another example of a survey question where only differences or changes are really meaningful and we can’t straightforwardly interpret the absolute value. I mean, how about “eggplant” or (for something more obviously socially constructed) “driving on the left-hand side of the road”.  I would have said a lot of things in society have no particular moral valence, but also it’s not clear how you’d categorise “most” in cases where “good or evil or complicated” is a genuine question. The differences between groups are still potentially interesting, as might be changes over time.
  • Not precisely ‘statistics’ or ‘in the media’, but a YouTube video of Adam Savage (Mythbusters) talking about measurement via Graeme Edgeler
  • I gave a talk about StatsChat at a conference on undergraduate statistics and maths teaching
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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 »