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Comment by ProblemFactory | Hacker News Reader

Effect size and comparison to other causes matters, because every study will be used as evidence for some political argument.

This study ("Marathons kill people!") will be used to argue for banning marathons in cities by people why are inconvenienced by the road closures.

A comparison to other common and accepted causes of traffic delays - or positive health impact of marathons - will prevent this misuse.

A similar thing happens with wind turbines killing birds. Yes they do. But radio towers, power pylons, agriculture, pesticide use, cars each kill 100x more, building windows 1000x more, and cats 10000x more. Yet it is still a popular argument used by people who are against renewable energy for other reasons, while nobody argues for banning skyscrapers.

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I agree in general and even said exactly this in my comment (comparing effect size in terms of X rush hours’ worth of mortality).

But in the specific case of policy adoption towards marathons, I don’t agree that comparison matters much for interpretation.

Banning marathons is totally different than taking action to reduce generic or rush hour traffic. Marathons are a purely recreational thing for society, nobody has any sincere need for them, certainly no needs to be colocated with dense urban areas.

Rush hour traffic is an emergent effect of necessary daily commuters and operations of a city.

Disentangling what part of it is needed, what can be reduced, and how to politically coordinate it is an entirely different situation.

In this sense, if banning marathons prevents even a tiny effect size on mortality, it’s obviously worth it, no matter if it is only saving 0.1 rush hours’ worth of mortality, or 0.01, or 0.001. Comparing with rush hour effect size adds virtually nothing to the process.

Banning marathons to save one life just because they’re recreational? Would you also ban all books because people have died driving to bookstores?

This is precisely proving my whole point.

The debate would be about the actual effect size as compared with the way society determines subjective value of things like marathons. It would have nothing at all to do with the relative effect size compared to some other benchmark like “rush hour.”

> If banning [something] prevents even a tiny effect size on [bad outcome] it’s obviously worth it

The same logic is why we now shuffle around in our socks at the airport. It is a terrible recipe for making policy.

Of course if you take it out of context it fails to generalize. Why would you think it should generalize?

Nobody is saying this about [something] or [bad outcome], only about marathons that demonstrate causal impact of higher mortality rate due to traffic impact on emergency services.

It’s not a recipe. It’s weird to me that you’d even suggest such a non sequitur concept.

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