I have a friend who was course VI at MIT but also a serious (chemical free) bodybuilder. He told me the story of working summers at a gym and he saw this one guy eating a large number of bananas as he trained. I don't know the number, but it was large enough that it was clearly going to be based on some serious bro science.
So my friend asks for the explanation. Guy asks him "what's the strongest animal?"
The answer (which I would dispute) was 'the gorilla'
I stopped going to dentists for years because two dentists in serial made up cavities. The first guy I let him drill. The second guy, a friend of my dad's (supposedly)I declined. This was in the early 1990s
I told this story to a friend years later and he said the same thing happened to him.
I don't understand? Which way? Making people overestimate or underestimate risk? I think it works both ways in medicine and public health. In public health (as evidenced by the pandemic) people are still vulnerable to acting on small absolute numbers because they don't see how they compare to the population. Likewise they might ignore a factor that seems like a low percentage thing because they don't get how this translates into real absolute numbers.
This is well known in medicine except it often works in the opposite direction, i.e. it tricks people into way overestimating the chance that something rare will happen. So yes, across a population, some children will die of COVID, but your child isn't going to die of COVID.
OTOH it often works against you in the forward direction, e.g. tricking people into thinking we should screen everyone for everything all the time, because they don't appreciate how many incremental adverse events this will result in at scale (vs. the improvements in morbidity/mortality stats at scale)
I'll second what everyone else said and add that the guy was absolutely amazing at capturing drums. Everything I ever read about the guy sounded positive to me even though the authors might not have agreed
The success of these ML models has me wondering if this is what Quantum Mechanics is. QM is notoriously difficult to interpret yet makes amazing predictions. Maybe wave functions are just really good at predicting system behavior but don't reflect the underlying way things work.
OTOH, Newtonian mechanics is great at predicting things under certain circumstances yet, in the same way, doesn't necessarily reflect the underlying mechanism of the system.
So maybe philosophers will eventually tell us the distinction we are trying to draw, although intuitive, isn't real
Based on what is reported in the article (and without reviewing the review studies) we can only say that claiming in a survey to eat less red meat is associated with a small reduction in heart disease risk.
After decades of nonsense high profile nutritional studies being presented then debunked the represented my policy is that I only believe large effects.
If paying customers are asking for features pay attention. If non customers suggest features, you should be extremely skeptical that implementing those features will result in sales
So my friend asks for the explanation. Guy asks him "what's the strongest animal?"
The answer (which I would dispute) was 'the gorilla'
"And what do gorillas eat?"