The comment insinuates that the study did not control for age. The study controlled for age.
It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.
It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.
It turns out that there is a profession with a lowest risk of getting Alzheimer's (duh, one had to exist) and it looks like a slight outlier (it's the lowest, we'd expect that one to look like a slight outlier). As outliers go it isn't that impressive, it looks like it is part of a fairly boring distribution. We just plotted 400 data points on the graph, the 1/400 chance weird data point is going to look a little weird. We're actually just reading a lot into the fact that the 2nd data point in ambulance drivers which isn't all that convincing.
Not to knock the study, I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that. But the study appears to be telling me that Alzheimer's is random with respect to occupation and ideally don't spend so much time on the road if you want to live to see old age.
Adjusting for age, Alzheimers deaths were 1/100 for taxi drivers, and 1/60 for the general public. That's extremely significant. However you feel about the graphs means nothing compared to the actual numbers presented here.
> I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that.
Your choice to be dismissively anti-science helps to explain the bad point you're making.
They aren't being anti-science and it's low-quality to suggest they are.
What makes you think that is significant at all? Anytime you take a lot of small subsets of a large random sample you expect to find outliers that look a lot like this.
That is https://xkcd.com/882/ seems to better fix the data just as well.
In the study they seem put the P value of the taxi driver outcome at <0.01 (in Table 2, although I admit I haven't read the thing especially closely). For 400 data points, we expect there to be around 4 values with a P value less than <0.01.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
To be clear I'm not claiming in one direction or the other. I feel that if you're going to attempt to discredit a piece of work it's on you to do such a basic check.
Really the whole point of that xkcd was to viscerally illustrate the practical effect of binary misclassification, or alternatively to make the point that a p of 0.05 isn't necessarily as rigorous as you might expect. Neither of those things directly applies here.
The article (and apparently the researchers too) advances the idea there's a causal link here, even though one is not shown by the research. They go so far as to generally prescribe spatial reasoning training as a way to reduce Alzheimers risk.
You might be tired of hearing "correlation does not equal causation", but it needs to be said here.
The misunderstanding here is widespread so it worth calling out.
It’s actually kind of funny that people are more sick of the mistake being pointed out over and over than of the mistake being made over and over.