nope. not going there with you. It's all right in the thread (unless you've edited it out) anyone interested can look and see.
Except I haven't done what you said - contradicted myself or said something was good methodology one time, then bad methodology another.
So there has been a misunderstanding - I misunderstood you or you misunderstood me. I can't clarify anything for you wrt a synopsis if we are misunderstanding each other from the get go. Examples would be very helpful to see where we've gone wrong.
I said this:
"The numbers in that graphic come from "a regression of symptomatic seroprevalence on a treatment indicator, clustering at the village level and controlling for fixed effects for each pair of control-treatment villages." You would have to run backwards through the regression to get to the raw numbers, which isn't possible for us."
You said:
"Ellis, what I quote above, from you, is
exactly what I said at some point yesterday and you replied that it would be terrible methodology and that's not what was done."
I looked through what you said yesterday. I found something similar from you:
"So, partly answering my own question, if you're going to look at every town individually, then a regression analysis begins to make sense. However, if that's what they did, then they should most definitely show the town level data in a table in their write-up.
So why are they looking at each town separately? is that explained? Does it make sense to approach the analysis that way? I don't know. Just asking because I think it is absolutely critical."
My response to that was:
"That would be to much data to include in the write-up (remember, there were 600 villages). But that kind of data is sometimes made available as a supplementary download. I would like to see it, too.
I said it was a gross oversimplification. Maybe I should have called it a metaphor. But you want to make the best use of the data, without adding in any opportunities for error or bias. That a number of measurements came from the same village is information that is lost if you just pool all the data. And villages which are larger or at higher risk (so there are more cases), could have a disproportionate effect on the results. Regression equalizes everything so outliers or other strangeness doesn't have a disproportionate effect. And at the same time it maximizes the use of the available information."
So, as far as I can tell, I said the result was "a regression clustering at the village level". Yesterday you said "if you're going to look at every town individually, then a regression analysis begins to make sense." Which is similar. And then I agreed with you about including the data somehow and gave a bit more explanation about why regression would be useful.
How is any of that me saying it was "terrible methodology and that's not what was done"? Or were you referring to something else?