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Weiye Loh

"Cancer by the Numbers" by John Allen Paulos | Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...cancer-by-the-numbers

Data Interpretation Statistics Cost Benefits Harm Cancer Screening Health

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached

  • The USPSTF recently issued an even sharper warning about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer, after concluding that the test’s harms outweigh its benefits. Chest X-rays for lung cancer and Pap tests for cervical cancer have received similar, albeit less definitive, criticism.

    CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe next step in the reevaluation of cancer screening was taken last year, when researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy announced that the costs of screening for breast cancer were often minimized, and that the benefits were much exaggerated. Indeed, even a mammogram (almost 40 million are given annually in the US) that detects a cancer does not necessarily save a life.

    CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe Dartmouth researchers found that, of the estimated 138,000 breast cancers detected annually in the US, the test did not help 120,000-134,000 of the afflicted women. The cancers either were growing so slowly that they did not pose a problem, or they would have been treated successfully if discovered clinically later (or they were so aggressive that little could be done).

  • Weiye Loh on 25 Apr 12
     
    It is difficult to communicate medical risk to a large audience, especially when official recommendations conflict with emotional narratives. That is why, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in 2009 presented its guidelines for breast cancer screening, which recommended against routine screenings for asymptomatic women in their 40's and biennial, rather than annual, mammograms for women over 50, the public responded with confused fury.

    Illustration by Paul Lachine
    CommentsThe key to understanding this response is to be found in the nebulous zone between mathematics and psychology. People's discomfort with the findings stemmed largely from faulty intuition: if earlier and more frequent screening increases the likelihood of detecting a possibly fatal cancer, then more screening is always desirable. If more screening can detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women in their 40's, wouldn't it also detect cancer in women in their 30's? And, if so, why not, reductio ad absurdum, begin monthly mammograms at age 15?
Weiye Loh

The Logic and Morality of Feminism - At the Intersection of Faith and Culture - 0 views

blog.beliefnet.com/...-and-morality-of-feminism.html

Feminism Religion Statistics

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Jul 11 - No Cached

  • if the masculine terms used to describe God in the Bible are proof of its hostility toward women, then the masculine terms in which it characterizes Satan must be proof of its hostility toward men.  Yet we can go further: if the Bible is a piece of “misogyny,” then why is Wisdom, which Christians later identified with God, feminine?  The name of “Judas” has for 2000 years been synonymous with unspeakable treachery throughout Christendom; so horrible is it that in spite of having once been fairly common, it has been millennia since any parent in the Western world thought to curse his child with it.  Indeed, Judas, the apostle who betrayed Christ, is the Villain Extraordinaire in the Western imagination, and has been for thousands of years.  Why, we may ask, would the authors of a book (or collection of books) allegedly shot through with “misogyny” identify, not women, but men and male figures as the worst of monsters? Why would it not infrequently portray women as being the most loyal servants of God?

  • As for statistics, the task of demonstrating “misandry” or “anti-male ‘sexism’” is unrivaled for the ease with which it can be performed.  The feminist’s argument from numbers to substantiate the pervasiveness of “structural sexism” against women admittedly has an air of plausibility, but this is only because the statistics to which she alludes are divested of any and all context.  Numbers aren’t self-interpreting, and to paraphrase Hume, even the most patently erroneous theories can be made to appear plausible if they are sufficiently abstract.
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: On trying to dismiss research findings you don't like (OR: On women being m... - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...dismiss-research-findings.html

Statistics Frequentism Bayes Religion Gender Stereotype Evidence

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Statistics 101: just because a difference is significant doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s significant.
  • the finding holds true across a wide variety of metrics:

    http://www.livescience.com/7689-women-religious-men.html

    “The percent of women (and then men) who:

    * Are affiliated with a religion: 86 (79).
    * Have absolutely certain belief in a God or universal spirit: 77 (65).
    * Pray at least daily: 66 (49).
    * Have absolutely certain belief in a personal God: 58 (45).”

    This gender disparity also shows up across 7 decades of polls.

    All this points to a remarkably robust result which requires, at the least, a great deal of explanation to challenge.
  • with regard to providing evidence for a particular arbitrary interpretation of statistical data versus another… is there evidence that appealing to p<0.05 provides for more accurate conclusions than p<0.01? Type I or Type II error, one must choose one's poison.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • whether an absolute but relatively small difference that appears unlikely to be due to random variance in single population (P<0.whathaveyou) is, for want of a separate word, informative, is thoroughly context-dependent (and no where is this a more important issue to acknowledge than in the already dubious realm of evopsych).
  • religious institutions are almost all patriarchal, and almost all hang on the prophesies, testimonies, miracles and other arcane meanderings of… men. Which puts a big bloody question mark over the idea that women are, by pure voluntary association, more likely to be religious. The shadow of coercion, so neatly emphasized by such thrilling events as the Salem Witch trials, is strong and it is thoroughly male. That the religious leanings of that extra woman in the group of 20 are due to a profound social pressure does not seem like an outrageous hypothesis. Certainly a better one than “Women are more religious than men because they’re women”.
  • Me: I think any investigation of gender differences in skepticism cannot ignore the fact that women are more religious than men.
  • DSKS: Women are not more religious than men. Much like the intelligence difference issue, there’s a palpable irony in the fact that the statistics of such studies are so often approached by men with exactly the kind of lazily intuitive thinking that the data ostensibly suggest women are the more prone to.
  • Me: A p-value of 5% is standard in social science and is a good compromise between Type I and Type II errors. That’s the reason why good research must be replicable – and 7 decades of polls is surely sufficient for that. In any event, this is a very simple research finding (very unlike studies of whether drugs are more effective than placebos) with an effect size larger than what you typically find in research, so I am sure the p-value is far below 1%.
  • As for biological differences, when did they come into the picture?! What I was referring to was the very uncontroversial finding that women are *more religious* than men, not that there’re inherent biological reasons why this is so. There are various theories put forward to explain why women are more religious than men, and not all of them are biologically grounded.
  • When you sample size is 20 – 10 in each population – I would not draw any strong conclusions. Yet when we crank up the sample size – in theory 30 is the minimum you need to get a reasonably accurate result – and more importantly, replicate the findings multiple times, attempts at denying findings you don’t like look more and more like delusion (the social baggage that invariably taints such investigations is not always on the part of those seeking to draw conclusions from research).

    I’m assuming that you don’t think very highly of social science research in general, since more or less all of it can be objected to on similar grounds.
  • DSKS: I have no general aversion to social science. Arguably the best and the worst use of statistics occurs within that discipline. (Your last post suggests that you might be of a frequentist disposition, which is interesting because this approach is currently under pressure in the social sciences, assailed as it is by the Bayes brigade.
  • as I understand it the majority of these studies have not been conducted to the standards of a serious quantitative study by a team of social science researchers anyway; mostly basic Q&A based polls from Gallup and similar outfits. Outfits that have been notoriously wrong in there poll-based predictions for more concrete things like voting patterns. These also tend to return the kinds of numbers that are ripe for cooking in all sorts of ways to yield different strengths of interpretation. e.g. for the following:

    * Are affiliated with a religion: 86 (79)
    * Have absolutely certain belief in a God or universal spirit: 77 (65).
    * Pray at least daily: 66 (49).
    * Have absolutely certain belief in a personal God: 58 (45).”,
  • Assuming equal sampling of men vs women, the female fraction of religiously affiliated, God believing, and praying are 52, 55, and 57% respectively. Suddenly, the differences aren’t so striking, and when we consider that the latter three questions are a little vague (what exactly does an individual consider to be “God” or a “universal spirit” and what constitutes prayer?) they’re even less so simply by virtue of being difficult to parse meaningfully.
  • At best we can say that there is possibly a weak but persistent trend indicative of higher probability of a randomly selected woman being religious than for man. But simply stating a frequency statistic that, “More of the religious are women” is very different from the statement and conclusion that, “Women are more religious than men”. Given as a hypothesis, the latter is as immediately falsifiable as the statement, “Men are taller than women”.
  • The widely accepted test size of 5%, after all, means that there is a 5% chance of getting the results in question even if your null hypothesis is true. I’m assuming your bar for “a serious quantitative study” is really high, and would disqualify a good deal of research; despite repeating the mantra of “correlation is not causation” when they don’t like particular research findings, I still see researchers fall prey to it – especially when they like what they find (one example: TV violence).
  • And just mentioning Bayesianism does not mean that women are somehow not more religious than men – after all, the statistics show that more women are religious than men, which will update your prior probability
  • While definitions of prayer and gods differ, we are not trying to investigate the research question, “Do more women than men hold to the Nicene Creed” but simply “Are women more religious than men?”. What sort of questions would you ask to determine religiosity, if not these?
  • Also, differences do not have to be overwhelming in order to make a difference. To turn it around, the gender wage gap in 2008 was 77:100 (this is ignoring very important factors like education, experience, occupation, industry and union membership). So the female fraction of earnings in 2008 was only 44%. Yet, if I said “Suddenly, the difference is not so striking” or that “at best we can say that there is possibly a weak but persistent trend indicative of higher probability of a randomly selected woman earning less than a man”, you can imagine the frosty reception I would receive.
  • Lastly no one (except those flogging straw men) seriously thinks that the statement “Men are taller than women” means that all men are taller than all women, or that “Women are more religious than men” means that all women are more religious than all men, any more than anyone would say that the claim that “there is racism against blacks in the United States” is falsified by there being a black President.
Weiye Loh

Balderdash - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...-me-other-day-and-said-on.html

Statistics Activism

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Dec 09 - Cached
  • According to UNICEF, total adult literacy in South Africa from 2000-2007 was 88%, and in the same period, female literacy as a percentage of male was 98%. A simple calculation yields a female literacy rate of 86.2%.

    To be even more specific, the female youth (15-24) literacy rate in the same period was 96% (which is actually a sliver higher than the male one, at 95%).
  • the chance of a woman born in South Africa 1-2 decades ago learning how to read in her lifetime is even higher
  • It is implausible that 86.2% of South African women have been raped, but a figure is still preferred.

    Most rape statistics don't give a woman's lifetime rape probability, but instead talk about statistics like a woman being raped every 26 seconds or 36,190 rapes in 2007-2008.

    However, that gives rise to the problem of double counting - some women will be raped more than once, while others will not be raped at all, so counting the number of rapes is not helpful for determining a woman's chance of being raped.

    I tried to find a source for a woman's chance of being raped in her lifetime, but such statistics were hard to get. Charlize Theron says that the number is one in three and the Treatment Action Campaign and South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) give the same figure. The Community Intervention Centre and the Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication give a figure of one in two. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is more conservative, with a one-in-four estimate.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • it is clear that a woman born in South Africa has a much greater chance of learning how to read than of being raped. Unfortunately, it's easier to cite a reputable source like the BBC instead of checking suspiciously high figures, so no doubt the "more likely to be raped than to learn how to read" statistic will continue being circulated and propagated.

    As someone else questioning the statistics remarks:

    "where activism often falls short is a cavalier attitude towards and the use of "facts" and "statistics". By overstating their case, passionate activists de-legitimize their imperative"
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Dec 09
     
    The BBC reports that "It is a fact that a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped, than learning how to read", and this statistic is very widely cited.

    While South Africa certainly has the highest rape rate in the world, this statistic sounded sensationalistic, and too "good" to be true.
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