A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “confounding factors”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott examines studies linking sleeping pills to increased mortality, highlighting a new study that found no link after adjusting for 300 confounders, potentially challenging the validity of less thorough studies.
Scott Alexander cautions against drawing strong conclusions from regional scatterplots, demonstrating how apparent correlations can be artifacts of regional clustering rather than true relationships.
Scott Alexander examines the relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates, finding a likely causal link but noting it's not the main factor in the US's high murder rate.
Scott criticizes a study linking childhood bullying to negative adult outcomes, arguing that its method of controlling for confounders is inadequate and proposing alternative explanations for the correlation.