The problem is, this study is hopelessly confounded. It doesn't control for make and model, options, sticker price, etc.
To illustrate, we might expect more expensive cars to depreciate faster. If color correlates with sticker price, we'll see what appear to be color effects on depreciation. For SUVs, this is exactly what we see. Yellow SUVs have the lowest sticker prices, and depreciate the least.
But this isn't the whole story. In general we see the same strong pattern for other types of vehicles — but for e.g. sedans yellow *is* an odd outlier with surprisingly low deprecation. Indeed there could be a causal element here.
But the key points are 1) the analysis doesn't attempt to deal with confounding, despite the fact that the original dataset would have a lot of what you'd need, and 2) the story focuses on the net values instead of the residual against prediction given sticker prices.
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My colleague, epidemiologist @joel_c_miller, has done a great job of debunking mis- and disinformation throughout the pandemic. In this great thread, he takes on the claim that COVID is basically harmless, and any excess deaths are due to fear and stress from social precautions.
Instead of calling the person an idiot, he does nice job of explaining how you might test such a hypothesis — and then looks to the data to show that this story about fear and stress is entirely unsupported. The whole thing is well worth a read.
But there's something else interesting here.
The fear-and-stress argument is introduced with an historical account about a medieval experiment conducted by medieval Persian philosopher Avicenna / Ibn Sīnā.
I love seeing journalists do a textbook job of calling bullshit on the misleading use of quantitative data.
Here's a great example. @RonDeSantisFL claimed that despite having schools open, Florida is 34th / 50 states in pediatric covid cases per capita. nbcmiami.com/news/local/des…
I don't know for certain what set off their bullshit detector, but one rule we stress in our class is that if something seems too good or too bad to be true, it probably is.
DeSantis's claim is a candidate.
Below, a quote from our book.
The very next paragraph of the book suggests what to do when this happens: trace back to the source. This is a key lesson in our course as well, and at the heart of the "think more, share less" mantra that we stress. Don't share the implausible online until you've checked it out.
In science, people tend to be most interested in positive results — a manipulation changes what you are measuring, two groups differ in meaningful ways, a drug treatment works, that sort of thing.
Journals preferentially publish positive results that are statistically significant — they would be unlikely to have arisen by chance if there wasn't something going on.
Negative results, meanwhile, are uncommon.
Knowing that journals are unlikely to publish negative results, scientists don't bother to write them up and submit them. Instead they up buried file drawers—or these days, file systems.