> A very high-profile paper was published in BMJ on 2017-06-06: Moderate alcohol consumption as risk factor for adverse brain outcomes and cognitive decline: longitudinal cohort study by Anya Topiwala et al.
> The authors had a golden opportunity to estimate the dose-response relationship between amount of alcohol consumed and quantitative brain changes. Instead the authors squandered the data by doing analyzes that either assumed that responses are linear in alcohol consumption or worse, by splitting consumption into 6 heterogeneous intervals when in fact consumption was shown in their Figure 3 to have a nice continuous distribution.
> How much more informative (and statistically powerful) it would have been to fit a quadratic or a restricted cubic spline function to consumption to estimate the continuous dose-response curve.
The first rule of Hacker News is that you don't talk about downvotes. But I'd like to educate you, so here goes.
While I didn't personally vote you down, I can absolutely make a guess why. You posted a URL (a Twitter one, no less) with absolutely zero context at all. You didn't say "Here's what [well known statistician] has to say about this study." You also pointed to the Tweet, rather than the article (or in this case, more specifically, the recent update to an already existing article) that the statistician Tweeted about. You left all the work up to the reader (two clicks and a bunch of reading before they know why you posted a nondescript URL).
Why should anyone click on a URL to a Tweet without context? They shouldn't, which means that the URL adds no value to the conversation, which means the comment gets voted down.
neogodless got it right. I didn’t downvote your particular comment, but I often downvote similar ones that effectively say, “I have no counter argument, so read this random link that’s probably some wackadoodle conspiracy theory, but I’ll give you absolutely no context to signal ‘wackadoodle’ from ‘reasonable argument’.” If you have something to say, say it. Don’t just barf up a link to $DEITY knows where.
