[elif]

Well, you don't have to attack the bias of the author. You can agree with the author's findings that red meat consumption is correlated with the exact same percentage increase in cancer rates as previous studies have shown. He has not disputed that.

From there, you can say that his analysis is merely word-play.

"18% increase in likelihood for a 6% rate is only 1 more person per hundred on a population scale. Therefore it is only a 1% increase on the population level" is basically all he is saying.

It is fundamentally non-analysis imo: basic arithmetic meant to reframe reality in a way convenient for a desired headline.

[brokenkebab]

Such logic can make anybody say "wordplay" about any study which contains verbal interpretation of statistics, including the original metastudy.

[elif]

If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident"

That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.

[brokenkebab]

The wording you used for your example is purposely unwieldy, but even so it would be still logically valid. It's perfectly valid as well to say that it obfuscates a particular point you are trying to make. However, as humans tend to have different priorities, and values a wording you prefer may be validly presented as obfuscating points other people see as more important.

[elif]

It is a perfectly reasonable example. Both are individual decisions one makes for individual safety considerations. Introducing society-wide multipliers makes it harder for an individual to make decisions based upon the data. When I get in a car, I am not buckling up for society. When I invest food, I am not making a decision for society.

Unless you believe the primary function of this research is to inform policy decisions which have little to no effect, and not consumers, who have a very direct effect?

[brokenkebab]

I'm sure your intentions are good, but what I wrote is that any logically/mathematically truthful statement is, well, true. The fact that it emphasizes this, or that side of the argument doesn't make it false, and its value is in the eye of beholder, because proper desicions are based on cost/benefits assessment where both costs, and benefits differ between people/societies/tribes/whatever.

And what you offer me to discuss in response is that your position in your particular example is certainly right.

[DanBC]

Risk does need to be presented both ways - relative and absilute - for anyone to make any sense of it though.

People see 50% increase in risk and don't have enough information to make an informed choice. If you tell them that we go from 2 people in a thousand suffering ill effects to 3 people in a thousand they can make their choice.

See the work of Gerd Gigerenzer for plenty of examples of people caused harm because they were told only the relative risk.

[elif]

But in this case, the extra variable adds weird implications that are simply not true...

For instance, if half of the population became vegetarians, the rate of colorectal cancer would go down, and red meat would become even more "safe."

[parineum]

It depends on the audience.

Personally, if something will make a low occurence event marginally safer, I might not care. That's what this paper is saying.

Perhaps a scientific paper isn't the place for that (an article about the paper probably is) but that translated data is still relevant to a certain perspective.

[Sawamara]

But this is exactly the point of studies like this. They are written in a way that allows misinterpretation, and then the media can pick it up and run with it (like they did with this one).

There is a large body of writing about P-hacking, bias in studies, this is just one more in that long, long list.