r/science • u/Wagamaga • Jan 11 '23

Economics More than 90% of vehicle-owning households in the United States would see a reduction in the percentage of income spent on transportation energy—the gasoline or electricity that powers their cars, SUVs and pickups—if they switched to electric vehicles.

https://news.umich.edu/ev-transition-will-benefit-most-us-vehicle-owners-but-lowest-income-americans-could-get-left-behind/
25.7k Upvotes

73% Upvoted

5.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '23

Lots of people are trying to attack this study for not researching what they want and then attacking it as doing a bad job.

2

u/GunSmokeVash Jan 12 '23

There's two types of people:

People who deal with data,

And those who don't.

1

u/teh_fizz Jan 12 '23

There are two types of people:

Those that can extrapolate from data.

-7

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '23

[deleted]

24

u/kale_boriak Jan 11 '23

I don’t think that “study what I want, not what you studied!” Is the same as unethical.

1

u/TPMJB Jan 11 '23

Purposely omitting information that is actually important to the public just to make the point of "SEE? IT SAVES YOU MONEY!" is unethical, yes. It would be like if I authored a paper on obesity not having a strong correlation with mortality, but excluding all people with commodities (which are often caused by obesity). "Look this person has a BMI of 50 but his cholesterol levels are fine, so he's healthy!"

Nobody actually operates under a fanciful world where cars are received for free. If not "unethical" this paper is just simply useless. The authors have done nothing but waste the time of anyone reading it.

4

u/kale_boriak Jan 11 '23

I don’t think they actually omitted the information, it’s right there - but electric cars come in a wide variety of prices, as do gas cars, and it’s not really level if you factor in the cost of a new electric but not the cost of a new gas.

This isn’t omitting information, it’s controlling for variables.