{"id":145,"date":"2007-09-16T15:09:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-16T22:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=145"},"modified":"2007-09-16T15:09:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-16T22:09:00","slug":"teenage-fashion-bloggers-should-skip-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/teenage-fashion-bloggers-should-skip-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Teenage Fashion Bloggers Should Skip This"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I expect this will be very boring for a certain demographic, but I loved the cover story of the New York Times Magazine<\/a> this weekend (site requires registration<\/span>). Gary Taubes wrote about the tendency to confuse association with cause-and-effect in large-scale observational studies. In other words, just because you notice two trends occurring simultaneously, it doesn’t mean one caused the other. In the most amusing example from the article, scientists observed a decline in heart-disease deaths among women taking hormones. However, scientist Diana Petitti, who observed the same decline, pointed out that among the women in the study she \u201cfound an even more dramatic reduction in death from homicide, suicide <\/span>and accidents.\u201d Estrogen prevents murder? I think not.<\/p>\n

My point is that you don’t need to believe every medical hypothesis that bubbles up. Science is all about coming up with a theory and proving or disproving it. That’s how we progress. But my REAL point is that if I know you in actuality, and we are having lunch at Balthazar, and you are paying which would be so very generous of you, do NOT cite a study, your friend’s boyfriend’s cousin or US Weekly and tell me that:<\/p>\n