Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalmi10 | Hacker News Reader

Please fix the title. It's misleading. The linked article in no way claims that "Parachutes prevent death when jumping from aircraft".

View on HN

Given that it says "randomised trial", it's implied that there would be a control group — a group of people who are sent to die for the sake of an experiment.

Given that nobody would ever do this, it's quite obvious that there's some tongue-in-cheek angle to the story.

It isn't misleading if you can read between the lines.

The finding was that parachutes have no effect on deaths. Title is the exact opposite of the finding.

To the contrary, I think it might be you who is jumping to unfounded conclusions. Contrast the current title "Parachutes prevent death when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial" with the first line of from the Conclusion of the paper: "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention".

Well, maybe it does if you correct for the obvious errors in the statistical analysis. How did this get through peer review? I was particularly bothered by this sentence: "A P value greater than 0.05 was statistically significant."

Presumably they meant "less than", but it's hard to trust any of their conclusions with such sloppy attention to detail.

It's satire: "The PARACHUTE trial satirically highlights some of the limitations of randomized controlled trials."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com