{"id":6548,"date":"2014-01-24T16:14:01","date_gmt":"2014-01-25T00:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/?p=6548"},"modified":"2014-01-24T16:14:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T00:14:01","slug":"journalistic-eggggregious-error-of-the-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/journalistic-eggggregious-error-of-the-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalistic Eggggregious Error of the Week&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Journalistic Eggggregious Error of the Week:<\/p>\n<p>The august &#8220;Economist&#8221; just showed how companies with executives attending Davos underperformed the market.<\/p>\n<p>Well\u2026 looks convincing but they fell for an elementary mistake: companies attending Davos are large and geographically\/sectorially idiosyncratic; they did not consider whether large companies underperformed over the period<\/p>\n<p>This is called a confounder in statistics\u2026 an elementary mistake. People who drink tend to have lung cancer, but there is no strong relation between alcohol and lung carcinoma\u2026 It is because people who drink tend to smoke.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Confounding<\/p>\n<p>You can only make a comparative statement (nonbullshit, that is) by controlling for size, industry, and location. The companies involved are 103 companies with $12 trillion cap.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/photo.php?fbid=10151990682048375&amp;set=a.10150109720973375.279515.13012333374&amp;type=1\">(1) Timeline Photos &#8211; Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Journalistic Eggggregious Error of the Week: The august &#8220;Economist&#8221; just showed how companies with executives attending Davos underperformed the market. Well\u2026 looks convincing but they fell for an elementary mistake: companies attending Davos are large and geographically\/sectorially idiosyncratic; they did not consider whether large companies underperformed over the period This is called a confounder in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facebook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6548"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6550,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions\/6550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}