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magz
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15 May 2020, 4:10 am

There is one very important thing about science that gets routinely neglected when a journalist (or a self-appointed journalist) claims that "science shows <X>":

Errorbars.

As they always repeated during my Physics labs: "A result without errorbars is worthless".
Meaningful science always shows <X ± x>.

"One meter, give or take 20 centimeters" (you can roughly translate it to "3 feet give or take 8 inches" to get an impression) is a completely different result than "one meter, give or take three microns".

What we don't know is just as meaningful information as what we do know. Giving only the latter part as "holy truth that science shows" will lead to notorious misinterpretation of the results.


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kraftiekortie
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15 May 2020, 6:33 pm

You would have liked “Mr. Wizard” had you been a child in the early 1960s.



Fnord
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15 May 2020, 6:50 pm

Another thing journalists often overlook (or actively ignore) is when a single study gives an indication that X might be connected with Y, that does not mean that X causes Y.  In other words, "Correlation does not imply causation" ... but I guess that is too difficult for mere journalists to understand.


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