Comment by mabbo
2 years ago
The thing with Fox is that there were four people on the same TV or movie set that all wound up years later ill with Parkinson's.
But it's such a rare illness that most people who have it won't have ever met someone else with it before they got sick. For four people who all worked together to have it, it's a statistical anomaly if the disease is purely by chance.
Wow TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease
> When asked about the cluster by Howard Stern in a September 25, 2013, interview on The Howard Stern Show, Michael J. Fox stated, "Believe it or not, from a scientific point of view, that's not significant."
I thought Fox wasn't being accurate, but if you do the math on that, he's not wrong.
Parkinson's hits about 1 in 300 (0.33%), and that cast saw 4 out of 125 (3.2%). That sounds like it's a crazy amount more, but if you pop those numbers into an A/B test calculator, it's borderline whether you consider it significant or not, because the small sample size really reduces the statistical power.
It's definitely interesting but it's not wrong to say that it isn't significant by some statistical measures.