
Ignore the Headlines: We Don’t Know If E-Cigs Lead Kids to Real Cigs - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ignore-the-headlines-we-dont-know-if-e-cigs-lead-kids-to-real-cigs/
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hugh4
This being fivethirtyeight, I wish they could display a bit more statistical
sophistication.

Okay, so we've got six out of sixteen. That's not a large number, but it's not
small enough to be meaningless either. Let's talk probabilities. You could
have a graph. You could teach the reader some actual statistics. But no.

As far as I can figure out, the writer isn't a statistician at all, so I'm not
sure why she's writing for fivethirtyeight.

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ryan_j_naughton
I think this part of the article directly addresses your complaint:

"I asked Andrew Vickers, a statistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Center, to take a look at the analysis. He said it wasn’t surprising that
there was an association between e-cigarettes and smoking. The real question
is how big it is. While this study suggests that the effect is large, Vickers
found reason for caution in what statisticians call the “confidence interval,”
a plausible range of values for the study results. The confidence intervals
here are “ridiculously wide,” he said, which means that the estimate that
e-cigarette users are about eight times as likely to take up smoking as non-
users is just a rough approximation — the true increase in risk could be
anywhere from 30 percent to 5,700 percent."

