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abirchtoday at 4:27 PM2 repliesview on HN

mandatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/882/ "Jellybeans cause acne"


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mrexroadtoday at 4:37 PM

I was visiting a friend’s lab at NASA Ames the other day. I smiled seeing this on the wall there. I sometimes daydream about what it’d be like if our primary education system devoted an hour a week to reading / discussing comics (well, XKCD specifically), or pages form What If…? Maybe it’d kill the magic of it, but I still feel plenty of seeds would get planted along the way for more critical thinking later in life.

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pvaldestoday at 8:04 PM

Just the green ones. If they found a link, they found a link

I'm sure that the comic wants to be sarcastic but is missing the mark here. This is how science works. Trying and failing every color except green, does not mean that the green experiment has an invalid result.

The author is not understanding that each experiment is independent.

The correct cartoon should show researchers trying green jellybeans 100 times, with 99 negative results and one positive result, and then the press keeping only the positive (Or in this comic, claiming that all jellybeans produce acne).

Mocking the scientific method, and showing scientists as lazy people that play video-games is funny, but is just a cartoon, not the reality. People should not take XKCD as god's speech without any critical thinking. This in your workplace says to me "I don't really understand statistics".

There is an effect that is statistically rare just by chance, AND is consistently absent within a huge control group of "non-green jellybeans" (the author seems to think that this weakens the result, but in fact is reinforcing it). And it needs further research. Not less, not more.

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