Description: because cultivating the truth requires both seeding and weeding
As many of you are aware, there was a recent major update to the old Cochrane Review of smoking cessation intervention studies (trials) that gave some or all participants e-cigarettes. This report is an unfortunate turn of events. I foresee yet another highly publicized vaping “success” statistic that so hugely underestimates the benefits of vaping that it is really a perfect anti-vaping talking point.
For those not familiar, Cochrane reviews are complicated-seeming simplistic analyses where a bunch of study results are averaged together, using a technique that is typically called “meta-analysis” though is properly described as “synthetic meta-analysis” (as in, synthesizing the results; it is not the only kind of meta-analysis). For those not familiar with that methodology, it is basically junk science if a set of fairly strong conditions is not met, conditions which are far from being met in the present
For more on that general observation, see this previous post . I am not going to go into that level of detail again here, but I will summarize. First, just because you can declare a bunch of numbers to be part of the same category and average them together doesn’t mean it makes any sense to do so. A bunch of studies with different interventions, different populations, and other different methods cannot be treated as if they were just one big study of a single phenomenon, even if they can all be described wi
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