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Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

The sample is in no way random or representative of the general population in the least bit.

This is overstating it, and you are focused on culture. DNA testing could confirm a few points that would be 'representative' of the general population. If you avoid the overtechnical/literal interpretation, you are not saying so much. The implication this is otherwise 'anecdotal' data is probaly a bit too simplistics as well.

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So you think "warm relationships" and IQ - two metrics used for some of the study's key conclusions - are represented similarly among this group as the general population?

I agree that it may be valuable for things such as health metrics, since it holds socioeconomic factors relatively constant, like another commenter on this thread mentions. But at the very least these people certainly had access to better health care than the average person, or at least higher-than-average intelligence to be able to handle adverse situations during their life. That alone should be enough to eliminate any meaning this may have towards people in general.

As other commeters have mentioned, you're ignoring what is possibly good about the data. For example, if you are trying to study a perforance envelope you may want to omit samples with known flaws. Such a sample might not be representative, but it may provide insight into potential | obvious flaws or weaknessed not obeserved. So, from a bayesian perspective it might be interesting. Also, there is the other tack of abstracting out the culture and focusing on the science (biology). Thirdly, the strategy of using this data as a single composite to be compared to similar comoposite data (eg, stratified sampling) down the road. This is all without even evaluating the data present, but it is just some reasons why its premature to "jump the gun" in the way you suggest. Better to drop the pre-conceived biases and keep an open mind until something better comes along. You have to remember that a 75 year data set is a rare thing as a historical fact, and thus dismissing it due to the limitations of the historical period (which are inseperable from the data) is throwing the baby out with the bath. {etc}

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