You Cant Please Some People (a parable) Two of my old acquaintances got together and started the Stu-the-Coop fast food business featuring their fried chicken haggis dish. Strange as it might seem, it caught on and was doing well. Then in the town where they started their first restaurant, some score or so of people got very sick and someone blamed the Fried Chicken Haggis. The FDA required them to conduct a study to see if people who had consumed the dish had gotten sick, or Heaven forbid, died from it. So although Stu is a chemist, and Coop has a degree in math, they wanted me to conduct the study so as to not appear to have conflict of interest. So here is the transcript of the meeting I had with them to review the study: -OK, Skeen, you took our 12,000 data samples of people who had just eaten FCH and what did the study yield. *97% of them died. You got to shut down the business. -97% died! 97% of 12,000 people!? *Well, actually .... I didnt much care for most of those interviews and the answers and reports, so I threw out 11,200 of them and just kept 800. -You cant do that! It makes the study invalid! *No it doesnt, people do it all the time and you applaud it. -No, we.... oh, well, but even so ... you are saying 97% of those 800 people died!? *Ho, yez ... deader than 4:00 in the morning, it was tragic. -Why havent we heard about this many people dying? *Dont know. But they died none the less. Well, if they did not volunteer that they were alive, we assumed they were dead or as good as. -What!? You cant collect data, then sift through it to pick the ones you want, then make up the criteria for the study AFTER you read them. *Yes I can. Whats the matter with you? Out of 12,000 people interviewed, the 800 I chose to base the statistics on, only 34 of them mentioned something about still being alive and so the rest are dead. Your product killed all those people. -This is not a scientific study and it means nothing. *Its what passes for settled science now days.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:07:54 +0000
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