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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 13 Mar 2025 \ parent \ on: Fired NIH workers fear bleak job prospects in the private sector science

My friend wrote to me...

Turns out it’s not too hard to find the source. The bad news is twofold:

  1. The paper dates from 1978 so it’s almost a half a century old.
  2. It only involve a sample of 20 students.

Primary source:
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197811022991808

The secondary source gets it wrong, reporting that there were only 10 students.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/doctors-flunk-quiz-screening-test-math

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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 13 Mar 2025

haha, another good example of how urban legends spread.

I mean, I guess the overall message is true: people are bad at statistics. But the problem seems to run even deeper than what's implied... including how the original progenitors of this trial didn't give proper instructions, and how the results of the trial got propagated in incorrect ways, and then how it developed into this myth.

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