WILLIAM M. BRIGGS critiques the “Sex With 21 Women Lowers Risk Of Prostate Cancer” study.

Yet the authors had no awareness that people could have lied—misremembered, maybe, but not lied. The arbitrary cuts were never acknowledged as arbitrary. The huge number of tests hunting for wee p-values were not mentioned. They did admit that only 63% of those without cancer agreed to participate, but 86% of those with cancer did. And since we’re talking about differences between these groups, this large difference might be meaningful.

And they never realized that statistical models aren’t causal.