Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

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"nothing at all about the power of the study merits it being called absurd. "

Well, I have not read the paper in detail, because I do not want to buy it. So I would not claim it to be absurd in its whole. But what I can read is that the title of it makes a factual statement, while in the text you find the word "maybe". So "absurd" might be fitting for that.

And 31 is a really, really low number, for the goal:

"The aim of this study was to investigate speech in individuals with a history of recreational cannabis use compared to non-drug-using healthy controls. "

Like others have said, there is a strong influence of subculture speech patterns.

Have 10 rastafarie influenced people in the group and sure you will notice difference in the speech pattern. And difference does not necessarily mean "worse". I would have to read the paper to judge what they exactly meassured. And of course, how much the "recreational use" of the person involved was. Because intuitivly: sure, a person smoking 10+ joints a day speaks different, if at all, compared to the normal person.

> while in the text you find the word "maybe".

I think it's fair to criticize a study if you think the headline (or the popular writeup) oversells it. However, my reading here is that the abstract basically says

"It's possible that W, X, Y, and Z are different in our populations. However we can't conclude that because after doing the appropriate controls, we only find that Y and Z differ."

The existence of Y and Z differences is itself sufficient to justify the language in the headline. What the authors are pointing out is that there are some obvious other variables to check, and they checked them, but their measurements weren't precise enough to detect differences in all of them.

> Have 10 rastafarie influenced people in the group and sure you will notice difference in the speech pattern.

But obviously this is not what they did. Again, this fails the basic sniff test of whether your criticism uses concepts more difficult than day 1 of statistics 101.

Yes it is possible that the cannabis sample is biased in some way. But the point is it's not biased in any obvious way. The same is true of any scientific study. All of Newtonian physics was biased against objects moving near light speed. That doesn't make it absurd or bad, it just means you had to keep measuring things until you found out what the bias was.

> And difference does not necessarily mean "worse".

Sure, but in this case it does. Intensity was decreased and the speech was more effortful.

> And of course, how much the "recreational use" of the person involved was.

"the researchers recruited people who reported low-to-moderate cannabis use" according to https://www.psypost.org/2021/09/cannabis-use-linked-to-subtl....

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