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by ridaj 1545 days ago
Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.

All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

2 comments

Yes. I found it interesting that fertility specialists are actually quite focused on statistics. It's because in majority of infertility cases there is either no explanation at all, or no absolute blockers to pregnancy, just less chances. The entire field is in big part focused on how to improve patient's chances in this dice roll.
Wouldn't you say that's a naive application of conditional probability?