Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by comex on Thursday October 22, 2015 @05:35PM
(#10435260)
Well, to be conservative, assume she was told or guessed that 7 out of the 12 samples were from patients with Parkinson's, which more than accounts for the "predisposed to thinking at least some" factor - actually it would make more sense to guess six, but that can only make the correct response less likely. Twelve choose seven is 792, so out of the 792 possible responses, she chose the single exactly correct one. No fancy statistics needed - the p-value (defined, according to Wikipedia, as the probability of obtaining an equal or more extreme result, the latter of which doesn't apply as the result is already the most extreme possible for the experiment) is simply 1/792 or about 0.001 (0.1%).
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Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by codeonfire on Thursday October 22, 2015 @05:42PM
(#10435311)
That's ridiculous. That's like saying someone who wins the lottery is clairvoyant with P=0.00. I mean they got the exact right numbers which had 1 in 147 million chance, right?
Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by exgrv on Thursday October 22, 2015 @05:50PM
(#10435351)
A lot of people play the lottery. Only one person did this experiment. When you test multiple hypothesis (as in your lottery example), you need to perform a correction[2,3].
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem
Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by swsieber on Thursday October 22, 2015 @05:53PM
(#10435369)
That's totally different. They didn't test a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of times. That's what the lottery is. That's different math.
Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by codeonfire on Thursday October 22, 2015 @07:45PM
(#10435943)
How do I know that? I just assume the guy that won was the only guy that played. If we can forget about all the people who ever claimed to smell disease, then we can forget about all the other lotto players.
Re:A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease
by oldmanjay on Thursday October 22, 2015 @08:13PM
(#10436061)
What I find amusing here is the only intellectually honest way you have out of the logic hole you've dug is to claim that you understand neither the lottery, nor the article, which then makes your opinion on either uninformed and not terribly compelling.
Were you just advocating for the devil?