Comment by holub008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holub008 | Hacker News Reader

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> How else would you like them to state that without being overly verbose?

"Our results suggest that some sexually transmitted parasites, such as T. gondii, may be correlated with appearance and behavior of the human host."

I appreciate your viewpoint. I would counter it by saying that there are two sources of uncertainty here: choice of model & sampling variance. It's my opinion that in scientific writing, one should be precise with which source of uncertainty they are guarding. If I'm allowed to group these together, why can't I make a similar statement of causation of any old spurious correlation - when obviously my model is bad?

Considering this example again - isn't it arbitrary that the authors get to choose which hypothesis (among many, like attractive people being predisposed to own cats) they get to claim "may" be demonstrated?

Similar line of discussion: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/04/04/thinking-p...

> "Our results suggest that some sexually transmitted parasites, such as T. gondii, may be correlated with appearance and behavior of the human host."

But that is a different statement. They say that they found correlation and there may be causation. You say there may be correlation, a much weaker claim.

> Considering this example again - isn't it arbitrary that the authors get to choose which hypothesis (among many, like attractive people being predisposed to own cats) they get to claim "may" be demonstrated?

Of course it is arbitrary. But that was their hypothesis and you have to start with some hypothesis, no? They gathered data to establish correlation between the infection and attractiveness. They didn't gather data for anything else, so I think it's pretty reasonable to say we found correlation and further research might be interesting to see if there is causation.

Literally the next sentence says "Taken together, these results lay the foundation for future research".

If you go beyond the abstract and into the actual article, they are pretty careful to just list possibilities for the observed correlation. They certainly could have stated that it might just be spurious correlation there, but I don't blame them too much. These articles are supposed to be concise and not verbose and especially the abstract is supposed to be as concise and short as possible.

I agree with your general premise and the linked article though. It should be a given to consider that and ideally also state it in the article.

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