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Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

> A 2010 study of 392 boys and girls published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that those who had trouble sleeping at 12 to 14 years old were more than two times as likely to have suicidal thoughts at ages 15 to 17 as those who didn't have sleep problems at the younger age.

Correlation is not causation. Children with crappy abusive lives stay awake at night wondering why their lives are so crappy, and they are more likely to kill themselves. Both from the some underlying cause.

Now that I have debunked this flawed survey, to be consistent with the new Andrew Wakefield doctrine, we the internet must call for the retraction of the study and the lynching of the authors.

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There are statistical ways to ensure that the results obtained from a study are both a) not due to chance and b) statistically significant to be applicable to larger sample sizes. Hopefully, both were applied and evaluated during the peer review process when a study gets published. I could potentially extract the actual data from the studies but alas, traditional media consider it a sin to link to the original papers and of course, a simple 'recent studies' is sufficient for us common people.

Edit: spelling, clarity

The data is not being questioned, the conclusion is.

I was answering to the "Correlation is not causation" statement in the comment. Epidemiological studies usually have to satisfy most of the "Bradford Hill" criteria in order to claim a certain association.

More information: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm

Would you be willing to make a wager that their p-value < 0.001?

You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.

Judea Pearl disagrees.

Links about Judea Pearl:

http://www.danielpearl.org/about_us/Judea_Pearl.html

http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R320.pdf

The usual link to Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) on experimental research, which is good food for thought:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

He disagrees with the idea that traumatising children is retro, or with the causation vs causality? It's been a few years since I read the book, but I had his do() operator in mind when I wrote the comment.

Edit: Okay - I clearly have to clarify my comment. Intervention studies are not retro. Studies in which you deliberately traumatise children, however, went out with Ceacescu. I was making a joke (albeit apparently a poor one).

I do not think they are considered retro. Interventional studies are widely considered the "golden" standard but they are not perfect and, in many cases, not feasible. Like you point out, in many cases, it would not be ethical to perform one ; for example, making people smoke on purpose and then try out smoking cessation interventions on them. "Luckily" though, people usually self-select their selves into these categories.

Another fallacy: depression is caused by an external stimulus, some sort of abuse. Abuse and depression are common enough on their own to show that they aren't related. This is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most people to getting treatment for depression: they see it as admitting their life sucks, but know that they don't have terrible lives, so they live with the symptoms because, never understanding why they feel like crap all the time.

Now that I have debunked this flawed survey, to be consistent with the new Andrew Wakefield doctrine, we the internet must call for the retraction of the study and the lynching of the authors.'

Actually, the Wakefield doctrine is about fraud, faking results, ethics violations, and accepting money from interested parties. There's no particular reason to believe that any of that is involved here.

The quote you have shows they are only noticing a correlation, there is no talk about the cause. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if we could find the original article and read it, the researchers would also believe that this is only a correlation at the moment.

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