That looks like it could prove really useful / interesting; thanks for linking.
I guess the entry requirements for beta are strict because they’re trying to keep to a small set of variables for the people to check? It would have been really interesting to spy in on though. Regarding the China study, it sounds either like there was no effort to control for other obvious/statistically-true correlates or that there is no possible overlap at all to abstract a controlled comparison from. A fraction of that data might be useful (all data is useful! …yum!). I think with sufficient (though perhaps improbably large) sample size even user-submitted data with large amounts of noise becomes useful. Any empirical paradigm more open and faster than the current is bound to be a good thing, even despite inaccuracy, for reasons of sheer brute force.
At least with user submitted noisy data you have individual data points, and potential to track individuals over time… unlike the China Study where entire communities were just averaged into a single point.
There’s some usable information in the China Study, but not as much as people think… it’s being touted as “proof” that all animal-based foods cause cancer (in a popular diet book by the primary investigator Dr. Campbell) because the two were well correlated in the data, when it’s nothing of the sort.
That looks like it could prove really useful / interesting; thanks for linking.
I guess the entry requirements for beta are strict because they’re trying to keep to a small set of variables for the people to check? It would have been really interesting to spy in on though. Regarding the China study, it sounds either like there was no effort to control for other obvious/statistically-true correlates or that there is no possible overlap at all to abstract a controlled comparison from. A fraction of that data might be useful (all data is useful! …yum!). I think with sufficient (though perhaps improbably large) sample size even user-submitted data with large amounts of noise becomes useful. Any empirical paradigm more open and faster than the current is bound to be a good thing, even despite inaccuracy, for reasons of sheer brute force.
At least with user submitted noisy data you have individual data points, and potential to track individuals over time… unlike the China Study where entire communities were just averaged into a single point.
There’s some usable information in the China Study, but not as much as people think… it’s being touted as “proof” that all animal-based foods cause cancer (in a popular diet book by the primary investigator Dr. Campbell) because the two were well correlated in the data, when it’s nothing of the sort.