I'd just like to remind people that any condition primarily diagnosed using a heuristic that's not so much flawed as just totally irrelevant...is probably not worth calling science.

If the units are "mass/area" and you're talking about human health, I promise you're confused.

This is the case regardless of whether that weird heuristic with its very strange units ~happens to covary~ with other heuristics that are closer to objectively reasonable.

I'd like to remind everyone to take a breath and remember that whether we are doing experimentation or observation, we will find what we seek:

If our hypotheses say that "increased mass per area is bad for health", we will erroneously find that it is one time in twenty.

And it's entirely possible that "elevated mass per area" is sometimes associated with health issues. Which will make it slightly more than one time in twenty.

So we can get a signal using a crappy heuristic ~even when we try to be conservative about what we believe~

Add to this that studies which find "no result" are less likely to be published, and what we can easily generate is a lot of overinterpreted results that, because they are consistent with each other...are believed to be accurate.

Even while many of them rely on a bad heuristic.

That's without factoring in how the culture we are immersed in can influence what we seek to find in our data.

Nobody needs to be upset about this. It's true that we investigate what we deem reasonable, and what we deem reasonable is influenced by the sum of our experience.

Human health does not come in "mass per area".

It comes in a lot of things (eg: immune cells per volume, suffering per day, and environmental exposures per lifetime).

But it doesn't come in that.

So, you know.

Please use units that reflect a basic understanding of how biology works, deeply consider how statistical probabilities shape what you are aware of, and, like.

Also consider not being jackasses for bad reasons.

Oh and finally please notice how I did not @ anyone.

What that means is if you're upset by this thread because you feel like it calls you out, as long as you don't say anything, nobody will know it applies to you.

Imagine that.

Yes this is about bee em eye.

No, I don't want to fight med, fitness, and self-anointed expert twitters again.

Inb4 "it's people like you who are going to get that man re-elected" and "we have to hit him where it hurts"