“If you can’t spot this fallacy right away, what about the other fallacies around you?”
(That’s what I am going to tell my students.)
But I am more interested by the tension between “solo” work (I call it “autonomous”) and the touted “collaboration” (sometimes called “managed research”).
Not that collaborating is wrong… but *requiring* collaboration means that some stones will not get turned, I think.
> I leave it as an exercise to figure out why the logic is wrong.
Because you have to compare it to the proportion of single-author papers in the population of papers as a whole, which may be even lower than 17 percent?
(I’m not a mathematician, so when you ‘leave things as a problem for the readers’ you leave things that may genuinely perplex me).
I wonder what fraction of the population–even of the population trained in statistics–can reason correctly about base rates. The research I’ve read on the subject is pretty depressing.
@downes
Thanks.
“If you can’t spot this fallacy right away, what about the other fallacies around you?”
(That’s what I am going to tell my students.)
But I am more interested by the tension between “solo” work (I call it “autonomous”) and the touted “collaboration” (sometimes called “managed research”).
Not that collaborating is wrong… but *requiring* collaboration means that some stones will not get turned, I think.
> I leave it as an exercise to figure out why the logic is wrong.
Because you have to compare it to the proportion of single-author papers in the population of papers as a whole, which may be even lower than 17 percent?
(I’m not a mathematician, so when you ‘leave things as a problem for the readers’ you leave things that may genuinely perplex me).
I wonder what fraction of the population–even of the population trained in statistics–can reason correctly about base rates. The research I’ve read on the subject is pretty depressing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy