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Fact Checked: New Problematic "Finnish Study" Actually Shows Trans Care Saves Lives (www.erininthemorning.com)

submitted 9 months ago by phreekno to c/[email protected]

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[–] feedum_sneedson 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Perhaps researcher bias is an issue, I don't know. Statistics are frequently abused and manipulated, but also frequently disregarded when the data "feels" significant - even in academic papers! It's been a long time since I formally studied statistics, but more recently I've been shocked by how casually they are glossed over in higher education. Consult a statistician. .. has anybody ever done this?

It's fraught really, evidence-based medicine is our best tool but when the subject is so emotionally (and increasingly politically) charged, is there anybody researching this who doesn't have a bias? I genuinely doubt it. In fact... my hypothesis is that there are no unbiased researchers on this. Which would possibly be the null hypothesis.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Consult a statistician. … has anybody ever done this?

Definitely not in academia. Agreed that academic papers are regularly published by people who know nothing about statistics, but threw some numbers from 3 trails into some package told them without any understanding of what they're doing other than "p-value below certain thresholds, so I put *, **, or *** in a column". And I doubt journals make sure to get someone with a statistics background to double check things for the basic sciences.

I'd just expect better in the medical field where statistics are much more essential and the results are much more applied in a way that directly has a large impact on the QoL of people.

Agreed there's no unbiased researchers. But you can be biased and still not make obvious exclusions to fit your story. And if they want their story to be "psychiatric care causes suicide," they should bury their central claim deep in the paper. It should be explicit about that claim in the title or at least the abstract.