Is the Scientific Approach different from the Scientific Method? (Sorry this is already starting out argumentative and petty; please bear with me). I was under the impression that the scientific method meant making an assumption, then testing the assumption in an experiment that included a control group to ensure that the things have something to be compared to. Maybe the Scientific Approach is a little more lax. I understand that you can't do an experiment with head trauma, but studying things like brains under the conditions of the assumption is a close analogue. Therefore it's easy to assume that they should have things that weren't just the things they were looking for.
And I'm not necessarily dismissing the process, although I'm semi ok with you calling this backtracking. I thought the article made some good points and kind of just bought into the whole thing. Bad move on my part. Establishing a contextless (no control group, no non-football brains in this particular study) may have some value, but not nearly enough to start the panic that it did. But they did start a panic.
Did they try to eliminate any brains with multiple factors so that they can clearly establish that football brains with CTE symptoms are really at 90%? Did they try to look for people with as many factors as possible to ensure that they got football brains with CTE to prove their point and it turned out better than expected? I don't know, but it's sounds like they didn't based on the breakdown of their study in that article. How could you say that football brains with CTE symptoms have a 99% correlation if maybe 50% of this brains were also in boxing clubs as children, or were in multiple car crashes, or some other factor which is believed to contribute. You were a network admin, you know you only make one change at a time, evaluate one factor at a time. We've no clue if they did that...I think.
I meant that those behind were assumed to have CTE because they had CTE. They went out selecting the people they were looking for and found them. Not a surprise.
Just like your better example, without something to compare it to, you can't draw conclusions from it. I don't believe that it was clearly defined within that study what a normal ratio of selected brains to those with CTE was. I don't remember hearing it. We assume that the ratio for normal brains wild be 0, but without actually comparing the football brains to normal brains it's mean-... Umm, well you said it's not meaningless. What do you call data with no context and no way to interpret it that didn't tell you causation so you can't actually do anything with it except another study that basically does the same thing you did but with relevant data and meaningful conclusions?
I think I just covered this. I forgot why I quoted it. I understand the importance of context. Maybe more than some other people. I'll DM you about why. You'll understand.
