Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
I can&#x27;t critique the article directly, since it&#x27;s behind a paywall.<p>But I can take the purported results and do some Bayesian analysis with it. Take first a prior - due to my knowledge of physics, my prior on microwave&#x2F;RF&#x2F;visual radiation having any biological effect is 10^{-5}. Multiphoton ionization has simply never been observed to happen except under extremely intense (read: it&#x27;ll melt you) fields and there are strong theoretical reasons to believe it won&#x27;t happen.<p>I.e., if this effect is real, it&#x27;ll require new physics to explain. Most likely 10^{-5} is a conservative prior on the likelihood that an experimental paper overturns quantum mechanics.<p>Now, lets take their strongest result (p = 0.02) and do a Bayes update with it, assuming a complete absense of selection bias&#x2F;etc (i.e. imagining this was a perfect RCT).<p>P(effect false | experiment result) = P(experiment result | effect false) P(effect false) &#x2F; P(experiment result)<p>= 0.02 x (1-10^{-5}) &#x2F; P(experiment result)<p>We can compute the latter as P(experiment result | effect false) x (1 - 10^{-5}) + P(experiment result | effect real) x 10^{-5} \approx 0.02 x 1.0. Assuming optimistically that the statistical power - aka P(experiment result | effect real) - is 0.99, the bottom is 0.020009700000000002.<p>Plugging and chugging yields:<p>P(effect false | experiment result) = 0.9995052399586201<p>Or equivalently P(effect real | experiment result) = 0.000494760041379938.<p>As a result, assuming you believe strongly in quantum physics (I do), this experiment provides wildly insufficient data to overturn QM and believe the effect is real.<p>Note: I&#x27;m not explaining here why quantum mechanics says multiphoton ionization is a tiny effect, negligible in biological applications, I&#x27;m just going to argue by authority: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrisstucchio.com&#x2F;publications.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrisstucchio.com&#x2F;publications.html</a>