Talk about Tight Bayesian Priors!

The Freakonomics Blog has a letter from one of their readers that the NYTimes-Guardian wouldn't publish about the seat belt - child car seat debate. Here is an excerpt:

No matter how the data was sliced and diced we found that car seat belts were more effective for children and infants (highly statistically significant effects). NHTSA did not like this conclusion and obviously never went public with it (did not want to discourage child seat usage despite the relative ineffectiveness compared to existing seat belt systems). In fact they verbally indicated that they were not even going to take the results to the child seat manufacturers of the day to foster future improvement.

The on-going debate about the comparative safety effects of car seat belts versus child car seats is very stimulating and interesting. Read more at Freakonomics.