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Monday, June 07, 2010

Dear people: try to think harder, even if it makes your head hurt!

This again is the case of a couple of links on the same topic piling up in my reader (this tends to happen if you take a pause in blogging :-)):

The commonality between all these articles is that they make statements based on faulty questions (PHD Comics says it best). A website poll is not the same as a scientific study (to name just  one the problems - it has a selection bias towards the reader of the particular site - which wouldn't be a problem if the results wouldn't be presented as applicable for the general population). And even if they were scientific studies, the purpose of a scientific study isn't to find the absolute truth! It is to present a hypothesis which doesn't contradict any of the current observation. But it doesn't exclude the possibility that in the future there will be an observation which contradicts the hypothesis, and as such, it must be changed.

1 comment:

  1. It may not be scientific but in today's Internet it's all about trends. What could be hot today, will not be tomorrow and that happens all the time even if it were not fact. :D Blame the trendsetters like Google or some other big Internet company.

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