(October 17, 2022 at 11:15 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:(October 17, 2022 at 8:59 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: How it does not? The fact is that a significant percentage of people (if I remember correctly, around 41%) having a heart attack also have low blood pressure. If the relationship is causal (and it is hard to imagine it is not), that means that, had those people eaten something that increases blood pressure (such as salt), maybe they wouldn't have gotten a heart attack, right?
Is that how you think scientists determine the cause of some effect? They just try to imagine if it’s not?
Just stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.
No, I think they determine the cause and effect using the p-values. I think the p-value can be estimated analitically here, but I am not willing to spend time relearning statistics just for this, so I am going to estimate it numerically using this JavaScript program (just like I numerically estimated the p-value in the latest linguistics paper I have published):
Code:
const how_many_people_in_the_general_population_have_low_blood_pressure=1/3; // I think it's even less than that, but let's go with that.
const how_many_people_with_heart_attacks_have_low_blood_pressure=0.41;
const how_many_people_were_in_the_study=100; // And I am quite sure there were more, but let's go with that.
const how_many_times_will_we_run_the_simulation=10_000;
let how_many_times_did_we_get_the_expected_result=0;
for (let i=0; i<how_many_times_will_we_run_the_simulation; i++) {
let counter=0;
for (let i=0; i<how_many_people_were_in_the_study; i++)
counter+=Math.random()<how_many_people_in_the_general_population_have_low_blood_pressure;
if (counter/how_many_people_were_in_the_study>how_many_people_with_heart_attacks_have_low_blood_pressure)
how_many_times_did_we_get_the_expected_result++;
}
console.log(`The p-value is ${how_many_times_did_we_get_the_expected_result/how_many_times_will_we_run_the_simulation*100}%.`);
Code:
The p-value is 4.32%.