You presume that I would rather live longer and drink than live for a shorter time and not drink. I deliberately take actions which do not maximize my expected lifespan, because a day of my life has finite value.
For example, drinking 2-4 drinks will impair me for a period of about 2-4 hours. That is a statistically significant portion of the day.
‘Statistically significant’ refers to a specific criterion of falsifiability that doesn’t apply to your statement as phrased. You could invent a metric to make your claim more easily falsifiable: for example, “My happiness measured on a scale of 1-10 will decrease if I drink X amount of alcohol per day” is a testable claim, and having tested it, you could examine the results for statistical significance. But just adding the word ‘statistical’ to your sentence doesn’t make it a quantitatively falsifiable claim.
I wouldn’t call 2-4 drinks impairment… then again I don’t often drink in a time span that I would otherwise spend doing productive or difficult things.
Same here. Mild sleep deprivation usually impairs me much more (and the two things don’t seem to add linearly for me—if I’m already sleep-deprivated, drinking alcohol on top of that won’t make things much worse). Then again, I’m about 90 kg (198 lb) and this needn’t generalize to smaller people.
You presume that I would rather live longer and drink than live for a shorter time and not drink. I deliberately take actions which do not maximize my expected lifespan, because a day of my life has finite value.
For example, drinking 2-4 drinks will impair me for a period of about 2-4 hours. That is a statistically significant portion of the day.
Nitpick: Why not just “significant”?
“Nitpick” understates it. That’s a pretty bad example of inflationary use of terms.
Because ‘statistically significant’ is falsifiable, while ‘significant’ is not.
‘Statistically significant’ refers to a specific criterion of falsifiability that doesn’t apply to your statement as phrased. You could invent a metric to make your claim more easily falsifiable: for example, “My happiness measured on a scale of 1-10 will decrease if I drink X amount of alcohol per day” is a testable claim, and having tested it, you could examine the results for statistical significance. But just adding the word ‘statistical’ to your sentence doesn’t make it a quantitatively falsifiable claim.
I wouldn’t call 2-4 drinks impairment… then again I don’t often drink in a time span that I would otherwise spend doing productive or difficult things.
Same here. Mild sleep deprivation usually impairs me much more (and the two things don’t seem to add linearly for me—if I’m already sleep-deprivated, drinking alcohol on top of that won’t make things much worse). Then again, I’m about 90 kg (198 lb) and this needn’t generalize to smaller people.