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by ludvigk
1074 days ago
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What is this biased way of reading CIs? Are you paid by 3M? Yes, it shows that with 5% probability the risk is only 1.18 - why choose to focus on those 5%? According to the study there is an equal chance that the relative risk is 12.7 times normal, why should we ignore that? |
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Your reading of the CIs is off. It isn't telling you that there's a 5% chance that the real risk is 1.18. It's saying there's a 5% chance the real risk doesn't lie in the CI, and could be anywhere outside the CI, including 1 (no effect).
Here's the main point. Increase the significance level slightly, say to 97% (if this is a 95% CI, or 92% if this is a 90%, etc). Then a CI that large and that close to 1 at the left edge will turn into a CI that includes 1. The effect is not significant at all at that level. It wouldn't be saying the true effect is significant with some probability or whatever you seemed to be interpreting CIs to say. It would be saying there's no effect.
This is markedly different from the case of cigarettes, where the p-values are astronomically small. Since earlier comments seem to compare these chemical to cigarettes.