Causal language study is now up on medRxiv!
https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262631…
Ever wondered what words are commonly used to link exposures and outcomes in health/med/epi studies? How strongly language implies causality? How strongly studies hint at causality in other ways?
READ ON!
"The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of 'the more information the better.'"
Herbert Simon
[sent daily as a rhythmic reminder]
Re-surfacing this old thread as a reminder to myself: more information provided DOES NOT mean more information received.
Also, as a reminder that I need to buy a new rope.
Shameless plug on a widget-filled piece I wrote regarding why ignoring uncertainty leads to poor decisions and some ways of dealing with it, in the context of GiveWell's cost-effectivess model-based selection process.
(also it won a thing)
as promised, the vast majority prize $ is going to get donated w/ feedback from the many folks who helped with this.
very, very curious to read the other entries and responses.
even more curious what GW and others do differently with this moving forward.
One first-place winner is “GiveWell’s Uncertainty Problem” by Noah Haber. The author argues that without properly accounting for uncertainty, GiveWell is likely to allocate funding suboptimally, and proposes methods for addressing uncertainty. (2/4)
http://bit.ly/3V18oyO
What are some good citations on rollout of medical innovations in US versus peer nations? A lot of treatments are available first in US and initial uptake is quicker but highly inequitable. Other countries often eventually surpass US in population coverage.
is doing our monthly #PreprintCommentClub this afternoon where Arcadians set aside time to comment publicly on preprints. We’re reading preprints anyway so want to help authors improve their work and readers gain context.
Periodic reminders:
1) People who are very successful in bad systems are not likely to do much of anything to change that system.
2) You are exceedingly unlikely to become the exception to that rule, should you make it in that system too.
did some poking around restricting it to certain fields, didn't see any notable differences in trends (just levels).
30+ years and thousands upon thousands of risk factor studies, and no one can tell me what the hell they even are.
Some context: an EIC of a major epi journal recently claimed that paying reviewers would not improve review quality or quantity substantially and/or that it would not be practical, and that ECRs should just review more to solve the problem.
* not naming, but is verifiable
Chat consensus seems to be that the "causal revolution" has had negligible impact on epidemiology as a field as a whole, where the impact has (so far) been confined to a small insider set and maybe a few subfields.
Also not necessarily a critique; tangible institutional change occurring in time periods less than generational is relatively rare in academia.
I can only name 2(ish) socially-oriented fields that have had genuinely major tangible change measurable in single digit years.
Genuine question btw; I am genuinely interested in institutional change.
Very likely that I am missing things, that the impacts are tanglible in some sub-fields, that they are happening but not yet observable, etc who knows.