Manski says clinical statistics research has a systemic methodological dysfunction
RexDouglass · x · 2026-07-29
- The post points to Charles F. Manski’s paper “Systemic Methodological Dysfunction in Statistical Research for Clinical Decisions.”
- The paper argues that several entrenched statistical practices collectively distort clinical decision research, including:
- heavy reliance on hypothesis tests for treatment comparisons,
- methods for evaluating outcome prediction that are too far removed from actual patient care,
- weak meta-analysis practices,
- and research incentives that create excessive certainty.
- Manski says the dysfunction is reinforced by how students are trained, how clinical researchers depend on biostatisticians, and how funding agencies, journals, and regulators evaluate medical research.
- The conclusion is that systemic change is needed to move the field to a better equilibrium.
More from Research
- 30 years on, deep learning still lacks a clear answer on flat minima — fleetwood___ · 2026-07-29
- Borrowing from Antiquity: New Framework Tackles 'Silent Failures' in Multi-Agent Chains — alizahidrajaa · 2026-07-29
- ISNAD brings claim-level provenance to multi-agent LLM chains — alizahidrajaa · 2026-07-29
- Goodfire says its block-sparse featurizers preserve the shape of model reasoning — bendee983 · 2026-07-29
- Relay-OPD improves on-policy distillation by handing failed prefixes back to the teacher — zju · 2026-07-29
- MODUS turns a decoder-only model into a single any-to-any multimodal system — EPFL-VILAB · 2026-07-29