Why should they make any assumptions? If no 'statistical' increment can be detected, and "statistics" is still science, then doesn't this resolve the matter?
No, it doesn't resolve the matter, since the lower bound on detectability is still a very large number of cancers (most of which will not have occurred yet).
Understand that regulation is not like criminal law. Radiation does not have to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That's such a strange thing to say; no-one is suggesting that radiation gets a presumption of innocence. As far as I understand it, there's no generally agreed viewpoint on the expected effect size for exposure to low levels of radiation. In this case, there was discovered to be no statistically meaningful effect. This is now something that new that we know.
That's not the way statistics work. You won't be able to definitively state there was an increase in the number of cancers based on statistics if the actual increase was smaller than the uncertainty in the number of cancers you would expect. That doesn't mean the increase was zero.
Except it's not "we really don't know", it's "after looking at thousands upon thousands of cases over many decades, there do not appear to be any statistically relevant effects".
pfdietz|1 year ago
Understand that regulation is not like criminal law. Radiation does not have to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
NovemberWhiskey|1 year ago
gweinberg|1 year ago
NovemberWhiskey|1 year ago
Testing the null hypothesis is exactly the way that statistics works.
u320|1 year ago
TheRealPomax|1 year ago
w4rh4wk5|1 year ago
Why should they? Because better safe, than sorry.