Thursday, December 29, 2011

A quote from Coase

A nice quote from Ronald Coase:
If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.
While this comment can be taken too far and exploratory data analysis is interesting, it is a good warning to medical (and other researchers) not to over-interpret data.  Of course, this presumes that decisions are being driven by data and not based on expectations derived directly from a theoretical construct.

The world is a strange place and our minds seem to be pretty poor at "guessing" the correct answers.  

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