Murph
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Inspired by @Simon M's bimodal distribution paper I wanted to share a tiny germ of an idea. It is a modest little write-up I did of a very modest little clue about epidemiology.
Basically I eyeballed a correlation in search term usage for mecfs with England and Norway and tested whether a correlation with English heritage would hold across US states. It did. Which suggests, just maybe, me/cfs could be more common in people with English heritage?
Some people on reddit insisted the existence of this post meant my brain was made of swiss cheese. Extra holey type. And that was despite me expending about 60% of the words in the post trying to explain that I actually know this is not definitive.
There's a frustrating dynamic in play when a person shares a clue they themself place low probability on. people come back to me and say but murph, this isn't 100% proof like you seem to think? And I say, welllllll, no. But they can't provide proof that it contains 0% signal either and so the back and forth of trying to disprove it risks turning into an unbecoming muddle. I apologise in advance for that.
That said, I know the history of HIV/AIDS is that following the epidemiology helped them solve it. I wonder if we could also do more on epidemiology. Please consider this as just an opening gambit, a feint, a prompt.
Basically I eyeballed a correlation in search term usage for mecfs with England and Norway and tested whether a correlation with English heritage would hold across US states. It did. Which suggests, just maybe, me/cfs could be more common in people with English heritage?
Some people on reddit insisted the existence of this post meant my brain was made of swiss cheese. Extra holey type. And that was despite me expending about 60% of the words in the post trying to explain that I actually know this is not definitive.
There's a frustrating dynamic in play when a person shares a clue they themself place low probability on. people come back to me and say but murph, this isn't 100% proof like you seem to think? And I say, welllllll, no. But they can't provide proof that it contains 0% signal either and so the back and forth of trying to disprove it risks turning into an unbecoming muddle. I apologise in advance for that.
That said, I know the history of HIV/AIDS is that following the epidemiology helped them solve it. I wonder if we could also do more on epidemiology. Please consider this as just an opening gambit, a feint, a prompt.
