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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!

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To: Dayuhan who wrote (35949)4/26/1999 2:35:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit  Read Replies (2) of 108807
 
Possibly the intellectual snob in me is overdoing it. I shall blame Chuzzlewit.

In which case I will take up the cause! There is an incredible amount of sloppy thinking today. Phenomena that are correlated does not imply cause and effect. Nor does it necessarily imply any connection at all. Statisticians look at this latter point all of the time. It is called "runs analysis", and yet you will hear sports commentators talking about "hot and cold streaks", when in fact those streaks can be shown to be consistent with uncorrelated, random events. In the stock market these "streaks" form the basis for TA (which is nonsense when examined statistically). Epidemiologists see this kind of thing all the time as clustering of diseases. It makes for wonderful law suits but really lousy science.

And that brings me back to a point I made some time ago: anecdotal evidence may be interesting in terms of pointing someone in the direction of possible investigation, but it is terrible evidence. How often have we heard something like:

My friend suffered from terrible <fill in the disease> but started taking <fill in the herb> and is now better. This is the stuff of quackery!

TTFN,
CTC
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