scuttled because not enough women were dying to get a good power calculation.
This suggests that the old methods were safe enough and this project was not worth it. Statistical significance is not the right measure, but this was probably handled correctly.
This does seem like a drunk and lamp post problem. [1] More generally, the concern is that actual care is delayed in the search for perfect information.
Yes, isolated communities are easier to study, a kind of lamppost. If you think that all the studies will work in the isolated communities, that is exactly the lamppost error and there’s no point to the studies. I would call that the search for perfect certainty of the answers to wrong questions (or limited questions), not perfect information, which I would expect to describe expensive studies of other communities. But I don’t think all the studies will be positive. I expect many interventions to fail even in the most controlled settings; they probably won’t work anywhere else, either. This is quite valuable information, even if it gives a pass to interventions that won’t work elsewhere.
This suggests that the old methods were safe enough and this project was not worth it. Statistical significance is not the right measure, but this was probably handled correctly.
Possibly—but some of the training methods might lead to fewer complications.
This suggests that the old methods were safe enough and this project was not worth it. Statistical significance is not the right measure, but this was probably handled correctly.
Yes, isolated communities are easier to study, a kind of lamppost. If you think that all the studies will work in the isolated communities, that is exactly the lamppost error and there’s no point to the studies. I would call that the search for perfect certainty of the answers to wrong questions (or limited questions), not perfect information, which I would expect to describe expensive studies of other communities. But I don’t think all the studies will be positive. I expect many interventions to fail even in the most controlled settings; they probably won’t work anywhere else, either. This is quite valuable information, even if it gives a pass to interventions that won’t work elsewhere.
Possibly—but some of the training methods might lead to fewer complications.