Stepping back to a philosophical point, a lot of scientific debates come down to study design, which is at a level of expertise in statistics that is (a) over my head and (b) an area where reasonable experts apparently can often disagree.
My normal strategy is to wait for Andrew Gelman to chime in, but (a) that doesn’t apply in all cases, and (b) philosophically, I can’t really justify even that except in kind of a brute Bayesian sense.
I’d love to get a good sense of how confident we can be that masks work—but since I’m not competent on the stats, I guess I’ll wait for the RCTs and stick with “can’t hurt, may well help” until then. (Like Vitamin D, but with a higher percentage of “may well help.”)
Thanks for this engagement, it’s great to see.
Stepping back to a philosophical point, a lot of scientific debates come down to study design, which is at a level of expertise in statistics that is (a) over my head and (b) an area where reasonable experts apparently can often disagree.
My normal strategy is to wait for Andrew Gelman to chime in, but (a) that doesn’t apply in all cases, and (b) philosophically, I can’t really justify even that except in kind of a brute Bayesian sense.
I’d love to get a good sense of how confident we can be that masks work—but since I’m not competent on the stats, I guess I’ll wait for the RCTs and stick with “can’t hurt, may well help” until then. (Like Vitamin D, but with a higher percentage of “may well help.”)
Sadly Gelman didn’t have time to destroy us. (He rarely does.)
Hah! That is definitely a weakness of my “What does Gelman have to say” strategy.