You gotta think about this one carefully!

Imagine you go to the doctor and get tested for a rare disease (only 1 in 10,000 people get it.)

The test is 99% effective in detecting both sick and healthy people.

Your test comes back positive.

Are you really sick? Explain below 👇

The most complete answer from every reply so far is from Dr. Lena. Thanks for taking the time and going through it!

https://t.co/jGt006Vlh5
You can get the answer using Bayes' theorem, but let's try to come up with it in a different —maybe more intuitive— way.

👇
Here is what we know:

- Out of 10,000 people, 1 is sick
- Out of 100 sick people, 99 test positive
- Out of 100 healthy people, 99 test negative

Assuming 1 million people take the test (including you):

- 100 of them are sick
- 999,900 of them are healthy

👇
Let's now test both groups, starting with the 100 people sick:

▫️ 99 of them will be diagnosed (correctly) as sick (99%)

▫️ 1 of them is going to be diagnosed (incorrectly) as healthy (1%)

👇
Let's now test the group of 999,900 healthy individuals:

▫️ 989,901 of them will be diagnosed (correctly) as healthy (99%)

▫️ 9,999 of them will be diagnosed (incorrectly) as sick (1%)

👇
Since your test came back positive, it means that you belong to either one of the groups that had a positive result:

1. 99 people that are truly sick, or
2. 9,999 people that are actually healthy (but were diagnosed as sick.)

👇
Basically, out of 10,098, only 99 are truly sick.

That'll give you a 0.98% chance of being sick!

So no, most likely, you are fine!

👇
Here is something important: this is true as long as our only priors are that 1 in 10,000 people have the disease.

For example, if you were showing symptoms, then your chance of being sick after receiving a positive test will be higher.

More from Santiago

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Before we get too far into 2021, I thought I’d write a thread recapping some of the research that came out of my lab in 2020. Most of this work was led by my talented team of graduate students, Kerrianne Morrison, @kmdebrabander, and @DesiRJones.

Back in January, a news story was published about Kerrianne’s study showing improved social interaction outcomes for autistic adults when paired with another autistic partner.

A detailed thread about the study and a link to the paper can be found here (feel free to DM me your email address if you’d like a copy of the full paper for this study or any of our studies):


Another paper published early in 2020 (it appeared a few months earlier online) showed that traditional standalone tasks of social cognition are less predictive of functional and social skills among autistic adults than commonly assumed in autism research.


Next, @kmdebrabander led and published an innovative study about how well autistic and non-autistic adults can predict their own cognitive and social cognitive performance.

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