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+--- Thread: Statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals (/thread-5586.html)
Statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals - C C - Jun 23, 2018
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2018/06/23/psychology-neuroscience-individuality/
EXCERPT: In research on people, scientists are typically interested in the group data – the mean, median, and variance of a sample of people. But according to a provocative new paper out in PNAS, the statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals, over time. The paper [...] isn’t really making a new point. The pitfalls of generalizing from the group to the individual level have long been known – but these issues are typically discussed in the form of hypothetical scenarios or contrived examples. [...But this...] show[s] how these issues apply to real-world data. The authors took datasets from six psychology studies [...] The authors conclude that the problem is ultimately due to the fact that most data from humans is non-ergodic – meaning, in a nutshell, that people are not interchangable – and that taking account of this non-ergodicity is necessary to perform statistical inference. Again, it’s not a new point, but many of the examples in this paper are pretty convincing illustrations....
MORE: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2018/06/23/psychology-neuroscience-individuality/
RE: Statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals - Syne - Jun 23, 2018
You just cannot make a standard treatment, policy, etc. by addressing individuals, and case-by-case is ad hoc and doesn't progress.