

The Median Isn't the Message, by Stephen Jay Gould - danso
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/gould

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traughber
I remember reading this back in 2008 when Randy Pausch shared this on his site
as he was fighting cancer:
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/Web/People/pausch/news/index.ht...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/Web/People/pausch/news/index.html)

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danso
BTW the Steve Dunn who writes the prefatory note created the cancerguide.org
site, a dense reference to cancer studies and treatments. He too had cancer
and died in 2005 (from bacterial meningitis)

[http://www.cancerguide.org/index.html](http://www.cancerguide.org/index.html)

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dmix
Oh nice, thanks for that link, there's a particularly good section on
statistics:

[http://www.cancerguide.org/scurve_basic.html](http://www.cancerguide.org/scurve_basic.html)

Good read, as I prepare myself for a biopsy for a neck bump with relatively
decent probability to be non-hodgkins lymphoma at age 26yrs old (thanks to a
combination of smoking and taking certain strong medication to treat another
illness that happens to cause cancer).

Note: traditional statistics examples rarely go beyond a 5-year estimate (as
they claim, most clinical studies are capped at that).

I came across a good Tweet recently: "The best cure for cancer is to not get
cancer". There are preventive means, so even if you don't have it, try to
prevent it. Ignoring early prognosis (for ex: colonoscopies), smoking, poor
environments, basic exercise, and unhealthy food is simply not worth it.

~~~
cormullion
On the other hand, don't make the mistake of thinking that simply eating
healthily, exercising, and not smoking or drinking will help you avoid cancer.
It won't. I've just watched someone learn that lesson the hard way.

~~~
mkesper
Yes, you can't buy yourself "good genes".

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eruditely
It's unfortunate that Gould's works are often pushed by those with an agenda
and fit his work to an ideology. Not sure if he would mind too much though,
but many do this. 1

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yummyfajitas
I doubt Gould would mind much, he himself seems to make creative errors when
they support his ideology. See the example of Morton:

[http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjour...](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001071)

Or see his almost militant misunderstanding of factor analysis.

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huxley
The article cited disputes Gould's particular allegations about Morton's
measurement bias.

The authors however did not dispute his "ideological" position which does have
a sound scientific and historical grounding:

"In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were
unfortunately common in 19th-century science [6] or that bias has
inappropriately influenced research in some cases [16]. Furthermore, studies
have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather
than discrete or 'racial', and that most variation in modern humans is within,
rather than between, populations [11],[17]."

Also:

"Morton indeed believed in the concept of race and assigned a plethora of
different attributes to various groups, often in highly racist fashion."

Gould was wrong in his analysis of Morton's measurements and made his own
errors but those were errors of methodology not ideology.

