Relative vs Absolute Risk
How to avoid being misled by statistics
In the tumultuous chaos that is science journalism, there are a few issues that stand out. Things that scientists like me complain about every time a new study is reported, with our endlessly tedious love of facts and accuracy. The most famous of these, thanks to the witty James Heathers, is that rodent research is often reported as if it is in humans instead — just adding the words IN MICE to many science headlines drastically improves their accuracy.
There are other problems, many of which I’ve written about myself. Observational research being reported on as if it is definitively causal. Basic, lab-bench research — cells in petri dishes — being touted as if it is fully tested in human beings.
All the issues I blog about every week, basically.
But there’s one thing that is almost always misunderstood, misrepresented, and makes a huge difference in how people view a piece of research. It’s a fairly simple change that can make a study seem either immensely meaningful or entirely meaningless.
