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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I think this is an important general question - how do smart laypeople interpret controversial data in an unbiased fashion? I have this issue with medical/diet/exercise questions all the time. For those questions which will be resolved in the future, I think prediction markets is a good answer. But that doesn't really apply to people trying to solve the problem today.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The Washington Post link above says:

'The panel's first step was to define "normal" bone density as that of the average 30-year-old woman. Next, the experts chose as their cutoff for osteoporosis a statistical point that was slightly below the bone density of their normal 30-year-old -- a definition they admitted was "somewhat arbitrary." Finally, they came up with a completely new disease -- osteopenia -- for bone density that fell somewhere between that normal 30-year-old and their arbitrary definition of osteoporosis.'

The Wikipedia article on osteopenia discusses the controversy about the definition of osteopenia:

'An osteoporosis epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic who participated in setting the criteria in 1992 said "It was just meant to indicate the emergence of a problem," and noted that "It didn't have any particular diagnostic or therapeutic significance. It was just meant to show a huge group who looked like they might be at risk."'

'The definition has been controversial. Dr. Steven R. Cummings, of the University of California at San Francisco, said in 2003 that "There is no basis, no biological, social, economic or treatment basis, no basis whatsoever, for using minus one." Cummings also said that "As a consequence, though, more than half of the population is told arbitrarily that they have a condition they need to worry about."'

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