From Furious of Feltham

[lathany]

One of this evening's news headlines is a story about a mother whose conviction for the murder of her children was overturned. As a result of this, the BBC website produced a page commenting on the suitability of one of the witnesses, namely Sir Roy Meadow.

Now, Sir Roy belongs to a class of people who really annoy me. Being responsible for convicting an innocent woman ? No (well, actually yes, but not specifically what I'm complaining about). It is because he is a non-statistician claiming to be an expert on statistics.

This happens... far, far too often. Doctors are particularly guilty of it because the use of their own data in the field of medical statistics makes a vocal minority think they know how to interpret all the results. But the lack of statistical training really, really shows. And it gives those of us who actually work in the field a bad name.

Grrrrr.

Comments

Re: Stats Blindness

[http://users.livejournal.com/_alanna/]

Yep, I think there's a further issue that both homosexuals and black Africans would be less likely to make it through our blood donation system than heterosexual whites for reasons completely unrelated to HIV, e.g. Hepatitis, malaria etc.

Re: Stats Blindness

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

True. I don't think either the original argument or my calculation concludes the case, but both illustrate the point that much more information is required before we can accept the NHS position that "homosexuals are too dangerous a group to take blood from".