[HN Gopher] Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
___________________________________________________________________
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Author : Anon84
Score : 341 points
Date : 2021-11-28 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.covid-datascience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.covid-datascience.com)
| tux1968 wrote:
| There's no way on earth they can actually know the movie-viewing
| history of those who recently died. So the data must simply be
| fabricated. It undermines the point they're trying to make. They
| should have used a real example.
| gregjw wrote:
| Its so so clearly a joke. Come on man.
| spaceisballer wrote:
| Or an advertisement for the new movie.
| tux1968 wrote:
| What's the joke? It seems to me they're trying to make a
| point about the study that appears lower on the page, the one
| claiming that vaccinated people are dying at a higher rate
| than unvaccinated.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Older people die more often than younger people. More older
| people are vaccinated than younger people.
|
| The study at the bottom shows that vaccinated people are
| dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated people. The joke
| is on the person who concludes that the increase in death
| rate is because of the vaccine and not the age difference.
| he0001 wrote:
| It is a joke as the author states in a more recent
| article[0]
|
| [0] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-
| say-a...
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| That's not a study. It's a blog post.
| boole1854 wrote:
| The joke is that not taking into account all known
| correlated predictors when performing a statistical
| analysis can produce absurd results. In this case, age is a
| metric variable known to be a correlated predictor of what
| movies an individual has seen, the probability of their
| death due to COVID-19, and the probability of their being
| vaccinated against COVID-19. The precise relationship
| between those four items is beside the point here -- the
| point is just that if you did not take into account that
| age is a metric variable and that it is a correlated
| predictor of both vaccination status and death, then you
| did your analysis incorrectly.
| paulcole wrote:
| From the about page:
|
| > Being keenly aware of political biases on both sides, my
| goal is to try to remain as apolitical as possible and try to
| filter out what I perceive as political biases and describe
| what I consider to be key insights gained from a particular
| report or resource
|
| It's hard to tell what's a joke anymore.
| OJFord wrote:
| I read GP as recognising but criticising the joke - saying
| that (with quite a bit more thought/effort probably) you
| could construct one as jokey and ridiculous/unbelievable but
| based on real sources to make the point with actual data.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Using the real data is the nice part of many xkcd posts,
| for example https://xkcd.com/893/
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| What are you talking about? Of course there's a way to know
| their history. You think Netflix, Prime, Hulu do not have a
| very detailed list of activity from their sites? This person
| also probably did not use cash for their recent theater visits,
| so their ticket purchases could be found as well. If they did
| it through a website, then the exact movie could be found. If
| they did it at the ticket booth at the theater (who does this
| anymore?), then with some extra effort of finding the time of
| the transaction and then comparing to start times you could
| narrow down if not determine exact movie.
|
| In the days of big data, to state that exact behaviors could
| not be determined is just not trying very hard.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Oh come on. Everyone else saying it's an obvious joke and now
| here you are claiming it's obviously a legitimate claim. Even
| though you can imagine a way that this information might have
| been collected, it obviously wasn't.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Really? This was able to be read without a tounge being
| firmly planted in cheek?
| tux1968 wrote:
| Sorry. Lil shell shocked at the moment by the responses.
| nzealand wrote:
| They didn't fabricate their data.
|
| They simply switched the labels.
|
| Not very well. You can see they didn't change the axis labels
| in this image here:
| https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cf58cd_449149dafb04485eb2...
|
| So the data is valid, the point is valid, but the point isn't
| about ghostbusters.
| sumosudo wrote:
| All the learned studying the numbers, trying to figure out what
| number constitutes a genocide, while doing nothing about the
| genocide that is happening. This poison is just that. Poison. The
| immense numbers of injury and death being caused by the jab, and
| not by a fucking flu, is sad to watch. You don't need to see
| numbers, or debate on correlation of ticker tallies, when one is
| seeing it. Good luck to those who think this is not happening,
| you will be brutally awaken very soon, because its worse than you
| think.
| rob_c wrote:
| I ... walks away from conversation...
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I understand why the author is laying the smackdown on Alex
| Berenson, but sound statistical reasoning was murdered within the
| first month of the pandemic and has been absent ever since.
| josho wrote:
| Care to explain what you mean?
| hedora wrote:
| Not the person you are responding to, but I challenge you to
| find a single COVID related article making the social media
| rounds that demonstrates a reasonable understanding of
| conditional probabilities, and presents data in a clear,
| level-headed, unbiased fashion.
|
| For instance, this article has a silly example of confounding
| variables (which ghostbusters you watched as a child is
| correlated to your age, and age is correlated to covid
| mortality).
|
| It proceeds to present two graphs "debunking" an anti-vax
| conspiracy. The first graph specifically controls for age,
| vaccination rates, and size of population.
|
| After preventing strong evidence to the contrary, the article
| then implies the conspiracy theory made the same mistake as
| the ghostbusters analysis. It provides an incomprehensible
| graph as evidence.
|
| So, F's in Statistics 101 for everyone.
| SnowflakeOnIce wrote:
| Nassim Nicholas Taleb put out a video explanation of how
| Simpson's Paradox applies here, which is more direct and less
| tongue-in-cheek compared to the post:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVRfBhy5vGI
| cblconfederate wrote:
| i think it's reasonable to infer that the ghosts are angry and
| are killing moviegoers
| mackrevinack wrote:
| global average temperature vs number of pirates:
| https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/...
| bhouston wrote:
| I believe they are excluding the pirates off the coat of
| Africa: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48581197
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Better one is the number of pool drowning vs. Nicolas Cage
| movie releases - https://i.imgur.com/q54sO25.png
| ffhhj wrote:
| Sid Meier's Civilization predicted it!
| moffkalast wrote:
| My god. It's linear!
| jmull wrote:
| > Maybe someone should explain this to Alex Berenson before he
| writes another SubStack post, or the thousands of people
| forwarding this around social media and alternative social media
| platforms.
|
| Of course Alex Berenson understands this perfectly well.
|
| He's among the utterly despicable group pushing various forms of
| covid denial for the benefit boosting their standing in their
| tribe. Whether it's for $-for-clicks or political capital or just
| to make themselves feel good, it's pathetic and terrible.
|
| Speaking directly to the people doing this on HN (including in
| this very thread): you're going to have to go to the end of your
| life knowing that when things were bad, you made them worse, and
| got people killed who didn't have to die like that. Do you really
| want the biggest contribution of your life on the world to be bad
| one, and for petty, pathetic reasons? Really, think about it. Do
| you want your life to have been about fooling people about the
| risks of covid, covid vaccines, and the general value of science?
| You don't have to live a sad, pathetic, less-than-meaningless
| life.
|
| If things aren't good, go out there and contribute rather than
| just tear things down.
| melling wrote:
| Lots of Spurious Correlations
|
| https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Another Spurious Correlations [0]. The message will always bear
| repeating.
|
| [0] https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
| lordnacho wrote:
| No, most of those are "actually spurious" in the sense of the
| two time series having nothing to do with each other. A lot of
| them are pretty short series as well, so it's easy for them to
| be correlated.
|
| What we are looking at is Simpson's Paradox, where the true
| causal relationship is obscured by information that isn't
| obvious from the plot.
|
| Now before you correlation != causation, there is actually a
| causation here that you can access with statistics.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| For more on Simpson's Paradox, see
| https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/,
| which I happened to reread this week, and which essentially
| serves as a spoiler for this article.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Simpson's paradox is when a trend or correlation is
| observable in each of the sub-populations, but vanishes when
| the data is aggregated. For example, a drug that has a strong
| effect on men and women when analyzed separately, but shows
| little effect at the population level.
|
| This example is not Simpson's paradox, it is simply the
| misuse of statistics. Statistics, being mechanical
| transformations of data, only have semantics within a causal
| model. Simply picking variables randomly and then assuming
| causality when the statistics behave that way is inverting
| the process of knowledge formation.
|
| EDIT: Thanks for the corrections--the _real_ data that this
| fictional example is based on does show Simpson's paradox, as
| the dependent variable (death rates) appears to show a
| _positive_ correlation with vaccination status when
| aggregating the population, but a _negative_ correlation for
| every age group individually.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Isn't that what's happening here? There's a guy who claims
| vaccination has the opposite effect to what people normally
| claim, that they actually cause people to die. And it seems
| to be because people from age 10 to 59 have been
| aggregated. The sub-populations, for instance ages 10-19,
| 20-29, etc would not be showing that vaccinated individuals
| are dying more often. It's only by aggregating them you get
| the wrong conclusion.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| You're right, I did read to the end of the post to see
| that but for some reason I fixated on the "contrived"
| example and the fallacy that it entailed.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| > _This example is not Simpson's paradox, it is simply the
| misuse of statistics._
|
| If you read to the end of the post, you'll see that the
| author was using this correlation to prove that the mistake
| is identical to another claim related to COVID [1]. This
| COVID-related correlation doesn't seem as spurious as the
| Ghostbusters one, but that's because it's much harder to
| spot errors like this when variables aren't so "random".
|
| [1]: "Vaccinated English adults under 60 are dying at twice
| the rate of unvaccinated people the same age"
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| The introduction to the article needs more context. I don't
| understand why it exists, who cares about it and who would
| believe that.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Often, you can discover such things by reading the article.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Often, but not in this case, hence my comment.
| 300bps wrote:
| Did you read the whole article? At the end it reveals the
| entire point - that failing to take into consideration the
| age of study participants in things like Covid death rates
| render false conclusions from studies.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| So a guy posted something on Facebook and got less likes
| than a teenage girl usually gets on Instagram. And so
| this another guy decides to preach to the choir because
| of that? Might as well write an article about microchips
| in the vaccines and 5G. I guess it also will hit the top
| on HN.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Berenson is not just some nobody. He is a prominent media
| personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson
| fortran77 wrote:
| > Did you read the whole article?
|
| This is Hacker News! Of course not.
| EliRivers wrote:
| It was pretty clear to me when I read the article. Is
| English a second language for you? If so, then it is not
| surprising that you may have missed some of the meaning; as
| we all learned in <native language literature> class, there
| is a lot more to the written word than a literal word-by-
| word interpretation.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I explain it a few comments up.
| neiman wrote:
| As Benjamin Disraeli said "There are three kinds of lies: lies,
| damned lies, and statistics."
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| Per Wikipedia [0]: "The phrase [lies, damned lies, and
| statistics] was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain
| (among others), who vaguely attributed it to the British prime
| minister Benjamin Disraeli. However, the phrase is not found in
| any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were
| years after his death. Several other people have been listed as
| originators of the quote, and it is often attributed to Twain
| himself."
|
| I had mistakenly believed that Twain originated this remark
| until I looked it up just now.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...
| OJFord wrote:
| Tl;dr someone fell for Simpson's paradox [0] and wrote a
| (probably 'viral') post on how Covid-19 vaccines are killing us;
| this is a (slightly confusing at first without context, I thought
| - especially because it starts of joking about
| correlation/causation that seems a bit different to me) rebuttal.
|
| [0] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Correlatio...
| emodendroket wrote:
| Berenson is one of the most prominent deniers, previously
| famous for his claims about marijuana being far more dangerous
| than commonly believed.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm curious how you're (as someone who it sounds like doesn't
| believe him/fall for it) aware of them?
|
| I believe you, assume you're correct, he's (nor anyone else
| like that) just not 'on my radar' at all. I just assumed
| prominence/virality of at least this one post due to the
| existence of one (the submission) refuting it.
| emodendroket wrote:
| He is a former New York Times reporter, makes frequent
| media appearances, and was very active on Twitter before
| being suspended, so I was familiar with him before anybody
| had heard of COVID-19.
| cldellow wrote:
| It seems to me that Berenson didn't "fall" for Simpson's
| paradox. He's a smart person. He peddles inflammatory rhetoric
| to build an audience.
|
| For example, he portrayed New Zealand's 2-week quarantine
| requirements for incoming travellers to New Zealand as
| "indefinite confinement for New Zealanders". When people
| pointed out the gulf between what he was saying and what the
| law was, he doubled down. I'd share the exact tweets, but
| unfortunately his account is now suspended. Twitter really
| needs a way to access tweets from banned accounts in a way that
| removes their virality but preserves them for posterity.
| paganel wrote:
| I mean, from outside of New Zealand that country does look
| like a "reverse" open-air prison, so to speak. Granted, the
| policies put in place have resulted in almost no covid-
| related deaths, but the reality it is what is, that country
| is very, very difficult to come back into (or to return), and
| because of that most of the New Zealanders looked trapped in
| their own country (at leats that's how it looks to a person
| like myself who lives more than a half a world away).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What is a "reverse" open-air prison, what part of
| imprisonment are you suggesting is reversed?
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| Not the GP, but I believe they mean that it keeps
| outsiders out rather than keeping insiders in.
| paganel wrote:
| That, and the the fear (for lack of a better word) of not
| going out of the country because getting back in would be
| impossible. As far as I understand that was the feeling
| of many of the expats living in Singapore, had they
| decided to get out of the city they couldn't have come
| back (and hence they would have lost their lucrative job,
| most probably).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I see. It's currently pretty darn hard for most of the
| world to get into the US, is the US also a "reverse open-
| air prison", which alarms the poster? Really, it's been
| almost impossible for the majority of the population of
| the planet to get into the USA before the pandemic. Most
| of the world would be thrilled if they could come if they
| quarantine for two weeks.
| cldellow wrote:
| That sounds to me like a reasonable criticism and
| discussion to have.
|
| That wasn't the argument Berenson was putting forth. He was
| saying that some large number of New Zealanders would be
| detained indefinitely in congregate settings purpose-built
| by the government.
|
| Again, I wish I could cite the specific things, but I
| cannot. I was left with the very strong impression that
| Berenson did not care about facts.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Beautiful country to be "trapped" in. Lots of amazing parks
| and mountains and caves and beaches and volcanos
| everywhere. I've been tempted to "trap" myself there for a
| couple of decades now.
|
| It's such a prison that billionaires are voluntarily
| securing land and building mansions in case the whole world
| goes tits up. Such a terrible place. /s
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-
| val...
|
| (Note: I'm aware it's not some perfect utopia and one of
| its issues is things can be expensive to live there,
| especially housing)
| paganel wrote:
| I didn't say anything about New Zealand being ugly or
| whatever, I did say that (from my perspective) the
| freedom of movement of its citizens across the border was
| severely limited, hence the "prison" term.
|
| Yes, I know that (most probably) New Zealanders were
| perfectly free to go out to another country had they
| wished to do so, but once there they couldn't have come
| back (unless they were a multi-billionaire like the
| Google guy), I regard that as a prison-like system,
| because it majorly forces you to remain put (most
| probably your family, your job, your everything are
| located in New Zealand, you don't want to give them
| away). Yes, it is a system that saved lives, but
| nevertheless it is a system that restricted the freedom
| of movement of its citizens for almost two years now.
| cableshaft wrote:
| They've allowed people to leave and come back (not the
| entire pandemic probably, but most of it), it's just if
| they come back they have to stay in a quarantine hotel
| for two weeks, especially if they tested positive for
| Covid.
|
| A quarantine hotel that a bunch of assholes were so
| fucking impatient that they literally climbed fences and
| dodged security to escape from just to grab beer or some
| shit and wasted millions of dollars as New Zealand tried
| to contact trace everyone they came in contact with and
| try to keep a spread on it further.
|
| When all they had to do was chill in a hotel for two
| weeks and then they'd be free to do whatever.
|
| https://thehill.com/policy/international/asia-
| pacific/570511...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/02/new-
| zealand-po...
|
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-
| world/man-...
|
| https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-delta-outbreak-
| man-es...
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/454613/covid-19-two-
| esca...
|
| A couple of these might be the same person, I just did a
| quick google search, but I think I've seen at least a
| dozen of these stories out of New Zealand over the past
| year and a half.
| mdoms wrote:
| I'm NZ born and bred. I oppose our current lockdown
| situation and think it should have been lifted a long time
| ago. I think we got extremely lucky in our first wave and I
| think our government handling of the delta wave (and the
| lack of preparation in advance of it) is shameful. I am
| extremely critical of our government and very disturbed by
| the media's handling of it. I could not be more depressed
| by the sorry state of our opposition.
|
| All of that to to say that describing NZ as a "reverse"
| open-air prison is so far beyond absurd I don't even know
| what to say. For one thing, Kiwis are free to leave NZ -
| perhaps it's Australia you're thinking of, which really did
| lock its citizens at home under punishment of 5 years in
| prison or a $66,000 fine[0]?
|
| 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_during_the_COVID-19_
| pan...
| OJFord wrote:
| What's the motivation for that? Infamy?
| cldellow wrote:
| I don't know his motives.
|
| The most charitable interpretation is he believes he is
| seeing something that the rest of us aren't, and he is
| willing to nobly risk his reputation in order to warn us
| and, thus, protect us. He is doing us a service at great
| cost to himself.
|
| That is certainly possible. I think it is more likely that
| he likes attention and money. This isn't an insult to him -
| I also like money, and sometimes, attention. For only
| $29.99, you may buy his new book, "Pandemia: How
| Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and
| Lives". The link is available in his Substack. (And
| presumably would have been available in his Twitter
| account, had Twitter not suspended it.)
| hedora wrote:
| It would make burning your credibility more permanent.
|
| Deleting banned accounts whitewashes the history of the
| person that got banned, allowing them to repeat the cycle
| without changing names/pseudonyms.
|
| That's probably a win for engagement and trolls, but a loss
| for everyone else.
| geofft wrote:
| Since it's Sunday morning and my religious tradition is on
| my mind, I hope you won't mind me posting a theory based in
| that tradition. The response to the pandemic has reminded
| me of nothing so much as the demons in C. S. Lewis's _The
| Screwtape Letters_. Their goal is not simply for people to
| die - if they die innocent, they haven 't gained anything.
| Their goal is for people to die while being culpable of
| great evil. At one point, the trainee demon Wormwood is
| excited to hear that his target might be called up to fight
| in the front lines of World War II, but his mentor
| Screwtape warns him that this might not work out the way
| they want.
|
| A pandemic, by itself, would be a tragic loss of innocent
| lives. A pandemic where half the people involved are
| telling each other to make themselves more likely to die,
| and then they all die as a result - now _that 's_ a plot
| Screwtape would love.
|
| Remember Satan's original plan. Are you such a sheep that
| you're going to be afraid of one fruit because you were
| told to be afraid of it? Why live in fear? Look how good
| the fruit is, and make use of the freedom you have to eat
| it. "You will not surely die."
|
| For me, the response to the pandemic - and especially the
| extent to which the pandemic is much worse because of the
| human response to it, from so many different politicians
| and business leaders in so many places - just confirms that
| human evil is real.
| h2odragon wrote:
| PDF copy of _The Screwtape Letters_ for those who need
| it: http://www.preachershelp.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/11/lewi...
| tehwebguy wrote:
| An audience is an audience.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Alternative explanation: He didn't "fall for" anything -- he's
| cynically exploiting a weakness in the UK stats presentation,
| with the help of selective citation, on a project of self-
| aggrandization. Try a scroll through the blog history.
|
| https://alexberenson.substack.com/
| rem1313 wrote:
| https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-english-data-on-
| vacc...
| CheckBlanket wrote:
| Yes, smugly mocking people's very valid concerns will surely win
| them over. Don't study the figures, just do as we say!
| geofft wrote:
| Did you study the figures in the blog post? On what basis do
| you believe the concerns are "very valid"?
|
| I do agree with you that mockery is unlikely to win hearts and
| minds, but the whole problem here is that the concerns are
| _not_ valid and the people with concerns are _not_ studying the
| figures and the people they 're arguing against are _not_
| saying "just do as we say," and yet the concerns persist.
| emodendroket wrote:
| That and once you start making television appearances and
| publishing books, your claims are fair game.
| adrr wrote:
| These same people are willing to take monoclonal antibodies
| which are human antibodies harvested from vaccinated
| genetically modified rodents. It's the same spike protein
| antibody just produced in rodents instead of their bodies.
| iso1210 wrote:
| You think that watching one film over another is more likely to
| cause you to die?
| ertian wrote:
| It's not (just) smug mockery. It's taking a post that might
| have made a big impression on people, and giving a deliberately
| silly variant to make it clear how the logic is incorrect.
|
| Just pointing out the faulty logic would've made for a boring
| post that many people wouldn't have bothered reading, and would
| risk being dismissed as hand-waving or rationalizing. Picking
| something eye-catching and obviously ridiculous keeps people's
| attention, and also can't be dismissed as mere rhetoric since
| the conclusion does actually hold.
| hnarn wrote:
| The reason anti-vaxxers are being mocked is because their
| entire MO is pointing out the sawdust in the eyes of others
| while ignoring the plank in their own. Calm and reasonable
| debate only interests them when their own so-called "valid
| concerns" are being put into question, but this is thrown out
| the window when they themselves find something new to
| misunderstand and publish to mislead millions for likes and
| five minutes of fame.
| ukie wrote:
| Keep calling them anti-vaxxers. It's definitely win them
| over.
| lbj wrote:
| Excellent analogy. I wonder if someone would be kind enough to
| shed some light on this graph:
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/
|
| If you scroll down to "Total Coronavirus Deaths" and click near
| the middle on December 11th, you'll notice a very rapid increase
| in deaths. December 11th was when we started vaccinating against
| covid.
|
| I'm not saying that the vax is killing people, but this is a
| diehard argument from those who are negative against the covid
| vaccine.
|
| What could a reasonable explanation be?
|
| PS: Someone filed for more insight with our national institute of
| health (SSI) and they replied that following the first shots in
| December 2020, about 4.500 people died within 30 days. This is
| generally understood to be because the group we vaccinated first
| was already above the mean expected age, so their time was
| already up so to speak, ie. death could have been caused by
| anything, including old age.
|
| I think it only caught the attention of the mainstream, because
| in all of 2020 we had a total of 1.250 "deaths with covid"
| whereof about 1.000 of these had more than 2 co-morbidities.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| There is a huge spike in active cases right before and after
| Dec 11th. More cases = more deaths.
| lbj wrote:
| That's true, but what you can't tell from this graph was that
| in this period we went from 10.000 tests per day to almost
| 200.000, so I think that might account for must of the uptick
| in active cases in this period. During some of our biggest
| spikes the infection% has hovered around 2 - 3%.
|
| Present day we have about 430k active cases, which is almost
| 10% of the population, but the % is still 2.3%.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Testing more will uncover more benign cases, that's true,
| but it is also possible that people are testing more due to
| having more symptoms.
|
| Vaccination has continued in Denmark so if vaccines were
| killing people we'd expect to see that rocketing as Denmark
| has one of the highest vaccination rates.
|
| I think the causality is:
|
| More illness -> More people get tested
|
| More illness -> More people get vaccinated
|
| More illness -> More people die
| lbj wrote:
| I agree that if the vaccine was killing people, we'd be
| seeing mass death. Currently we are experiencing +15%
| all-cause mortality, where 2020 was around 0%.
|
| The reason we are testing 200k/day is because you don't
| have many options for moving around without a valid test
| or vaccine. Ie. school, shopping, work etc requires it.
| [deleted]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The link to his dataset is missing. Show me the raw numbers, I
| want to make my own conclusions.
| colanderman wrote:
| For anyone as confused as me: the graph colors swap halfway
| through the article.
| nanna wrote:
| Nice example of 'correlation does not imply causation' and if you
| submit this kinda thing to me in my data analysis class I'll fail
| you.
| Ginden wrote:
| But if you submit that to scientifical journal it will be
| published. ;)
| cronix wrote:
| It worked for Hitler's Mein Kampf by just changing a few
| words using "feminist" language, and even won some special
| recognition from the publishers.
|
| > Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote 20 articles that
| promoted deliberately absurd ideas or morally questionable
| acts and submitted them to various peer-reviewed journals.
| Although they had planned for the project to run until
| January 2019, the trio admitted to the hoax in October 2018
| after journalists from The Wall Street Journal revealed that
| "Helen Wilson", the pseudonym used for their article
| published in Gender, Place & Culture, did not exist. By the
| time of the reveal, 4 of their 20 papers had been published;
| 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been
| rejected; and 7 were still under review. Included among the
| articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage
| in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia
| by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as
| Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist
| language.[2][4] The first of these had won special
| recognition from the journal that published it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
|
| > Mein Kampf and intersectional feminism aren't usually
| lumped together in many people's minds, but if linked with
| the right language and buzzwords, left-wing academic
| publications apparently will accept the combination as
| scholarship.
|
| https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/3/grievance-
| st...
| tejohnso wrote:
| Makes me cringe a little bit when global warming presentations
| start out with a co2 vs global temperature chart. Especially if
| that forms the entire basis of the analytic part of the
| presentation. Because I know someone (most) is just thinking
| "correlation != causation" and dismissing the entire thing.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Yes; interesting that they never bring up the chart showing
| we're at the peak of a natural 125,000 year temperature
| cycle.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Source? The long temperature graphs I've seen look quite
| irregular, rather than cyclical.
| morsch wrote:
| Here's the smoking gun graph he's hosting:
| http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG
|
| This is what he's talking about:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
|
| Here's a graph similar to his, hosted on German
| Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovi%C4%87-
| Zyklen#/media/...
|
| Nobody brings it up, because scientists don't believe the
| observed changes in temperatures are due to Milankovitch
| cycles, since global warming is happening on the order of
| decades and not millenia.
|
| Here's NASA's take: https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-
| climate/2949/why-milankovi...
| yobbo wrote:
| > global warming is happening on the order of decades and
| not millenia
|
| How do we know that temperatures inferred from ice-cores
| (or whatever) are not extremely smoothed due to natural
| phenomena? Can we really get resolution down to
| individual years such that they agree across different
| test sites and methods?
| missblit wrote:
| Well for one thing we don't have tens of thousands of years
| to wait for a natural ice age to counteract industrial
| warming that has happened within the past century or two.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Imo, this is the level of discourse we need on vaccine efficacy,
| risk, and data. It's funny and demonstrates some mastery of the
| concept of the sample bias behind it.
|
| When 80% of the population is vaccinated, the base rate of dying
| of anything at all carries over with them as people change their
| own status from one category to the next, creating a false
| causality link between the base rate of dying anyway and their
| status change to vaccinated. I'd say now do covid and its
| variants, but regardless, well done.
|
| We need smarter and more compelling people making these cases for
| important things instead of feeding lines to actors and poli-sci
| bureaucrats on television. The hardest part of the pandemic I
| think will have been establishments everywhere realizing that
| people thought they were too dumb to be believed. One of my
| favorite Holzer truisms is, "A lack of charisma can be fatal,"
| and I when I look at how this has played out, it's because the
| people announcing information and policies couldn't be taken
| seriously by 30%+ of the population even when they were telling
| the truth - which, unfortunately, was less than the whole time as
| well.
| draw_down wrote:
| If the correlation says more unvaccinated people are dying, well
| you should go get vaccinated so you don't die!
|
| If the correlation says more vaccinated people are dying, it's a
| statistical artifact, it's fake news, correlation != causation,
| you're a charlatan for mentioning it, why are you lying???
|
| Kind of like how increased cases are an indication that more
| people should get vaccinated. But if cases have gone up in areas
| with high vaccination rates -- why are you talking about cases,
| obviously you should be looking at hospitalizations and deaths,
| you charlatan.
|
| This has gotten old.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Man's not asking the right questions!
| JuliusBranson wrote:
| I'm not sure why this sort of thing impresses people, it's
| obvious the 1984 ghostbuster group skews old.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| That's the point? It's satire
| JuliusBranson wrote:
| People seem to take it as some sort of impressive critique of
| statistics and the scientific method. Similar to "there is a
| Replication Crisis, vaguely speaking, so your bigot facts
| don't matter." No, the replication crisis is mostly a
| function of low sample sizes and misinterpretation, if a
| paper has a decent number of people and isn't being
| interpreted by an activist (like, ie, the social researchers
| themselves), it's valid.
|
| Same thing here, this is only impressive to people who don't
| know how to interpret statistics.
| fullshark wrote:
| How can you think this is a critique of statistics? People
| are liking it because it's a clever brand of internet snark
| involving knowledge of statistics. You can say it's shallow
| and just for people who want to flatter themselves with how
| knowledgable they are, but it's hardly a critique of the
| field of statistics, just a critique of bad statistics.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The OP article I read did not not seem to be a critique of
| statistics or the scientific method?
| Tade0 wrote:
| This is a reference to this post:
|
| https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...
|
| I had a discussion about it at work because my teammate is vocal
| about the alleged harm that vaccines cause and is no stranger to
| confirmation bias.
|
| Shame that they lumped so many people into the same group,
| because if you look closer at the data for e.g. England:
|
| https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaTyp...
|
| There's a strong correlation between age and vaccine intake,
| because older people were given priority.
|
| The difference in intake among the age groups is as high as 50
| percentage points.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > ... lumped so many people into the same group ...
|
| This is the flaw in the UK aggregation, as cited from Table 4
| by the blogger. 10-59 lumps nearly-invulnerable children in the
| same bucket with 50-something obese diabetic smokers.
|
| Table 8, and the last line of Table 1, show properly-weighted
| vaccination effects.
|
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
| xoa wrote:
| This reminds me of the sort of light poking of common
| "correlation is not the same as causation" and "beware of
| confounding factors" statistical failures behind the Church of
| the Flying Spaghetti Monster "clearly reduction in pirates has
| caused global warming!" [0]. But it's a major in modern public
| discourse, and one for once that I'm quite willing to lay heavily
| at the feet of the public education system. Easily one of the
| most valuable classes I took in my entire time K-12 was AP
| Probability & Stats as a sophomore, but that was an entirely
| optional class with restricted openings anyway (a single teacher
| in a school of 1200+) which the vast majority never took even
| where it was offered. Yet interpreting the deluge of data in the
| modern world requires some level of being able to reason about
| things probabilisticly and have a sense of what actually goes
| into a measure of "significance", null hypothesis and the danger
| of result-driven analysis finding links that don't exist and/or
| cannot possibly be causitive, how sampling a population works and
| what the error bars look like at different sizes, random vs
| biased distributions, the underlying distributions, confounding
| factors etc. I really wish in general kids got started on some
| light probability thinking as early as possible, in elementary
| school even, without any real math (let alone calc and such) yet,
| but just some initial stuff to start to illustrate the mindset.
| Lots of very fun games and hands-on exercises with dice and so on
| use or could be made to use important aspects of probability and
| its misuse.
|
| At any rate, I'm certainly not an expert. But there seems to be
| some missing BS filter where people can recognize something as
| silly if the example is silly enough but not in the exact same
| logic fail for something that seems "more reasonable somehow".
|
| ----
|
| 0: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2007/10/...
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Statistics are meaningless without a rigorously examined causal
| model of the phenomenon under investigation. In my experience
| of statistics education, the art of crafting causal theories
| was scarcely addressed.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is very true. Systematic bias in observational data
| collection (astronomy etc.) as well as systematic bias in
| experimental data collection (particle physics etc.) isn't
| accounted for in statistical analysis of that data.
|
| A classic example I recall is a Feynmann story, where a group
| of researchers were getting very statistically sound and
| repeatable results of very unusual and unexplained particle
| track behavior in a cloud chamber. Feynmann looked at the
| data and said "you probably have a tiny piece of metal in the
| cloud chamber somewhere" and that turned out to be the
| explanation.
|
| Similar examples in the social sciences include systematic
| bias in the preparation and administration of IQ tests to
| different groups of people (see Charles Murray's 'Bell Curve'
| vs. Stephen J. Gould's 'The Mismeasure of Man').
|
| Hundreds of other examples can be found across all scientific
| disciplines, unfortunately. To quote the smartest PI I ever
| worked for "There's a lot of BS in statistical analysis".
| calibas wrote:
| I don't get this attitude, if things are correlated, it
| should at least make a scientist wonder why. It certainly
| could be random chance, but correlation can also lead to
| establishing a causal model or discovering a third variable.
| If two things keep happening in conjunction, it at least
| merits further investigation.
|
| It seems like there's this extreme reaction against people
| behaving like correlation equals causation, but instead of
| over-emphasizing correlation, it gets dismissed entirely.
| ohwellhere wrote:
| I share this criticism. It's almost like you have to scream
| at people that although correlation doesn't imply _direct_
| causation, it most certainly does imply some causal chain.
|
| Ruling out chance through significance and power, what
| phenomenon in the world is correlated without being
| causally related _somehow_?
| PeterSmit wrote:
| Well, it can also be pure randomness
| umanwizard wrote:
| They did say "ruling out chance".
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| There is a scale of certainty with causality. Evidently we
| aren't always good at expressing the difference between
| light evidence of causality and heavy evidence of
| causality. Do we have the right words? Are we using them?
|
| So in other words, several of the commenters here are
| right. On the one hand we shouldn't jump to conclusions,
| but on the other hand we should listen to the clues.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yes, the classic example being the connection of lung
| cancer to smoking. Initially it was just a correlation, but
| the correlation encouraged scientists to see if there was
| actually a causal relationship (which of course there was).
| Yes, many (probably most) correlations are spurious, but
| the existence of a correlation is very useful for
| scientists looking to find a hypothesis to test.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I don't remember who said that (pretty sure that it was R
| Monroe in xkcd, as usual): correlation is not causation but
| the data is heavily winking at you (it was more funny in
| his words)
| strogonoff wrote:
| Consider that we can't even truly conclusively identify
| true causation using scientific experiment alone.
| Correlations and conjectures is ultimately all we have.
|
| Nevertheless, the fallacy is so commonplace. You will
| easily find a seemingly educated person selectively balking
| at the notion that causal relationship is ultimately a
| conjecture _or_ at the notion that causal relationship is
| possible, depending on their pre-existing beliefs.
|
| Being emotionally attached to purported causal relationship
| X->Y, they will count all correlational evidence in favor;
| when pointed out that the evidence is correlational, they
| will wave it off with more correlational evidence.
|
| If that causal relationship does not happen to align with
| their world view, of course, they will be right onto you
| with the old correlation-does-not-imply-causation mantra.
| ajuc wrote:
| > if things are correlated, it should at least make a
| scientist wonder why
|
| There's billions of possible variables. There's N^2
| possible pairs of variables. It's not feasible to look at
| every pair that is correlated.
| jmugan wrote:
| Can you point to a good source on that? The stats books that
| I've seen seem to treat it as a collection of tools, and
| causality in computer science (AI) seems like a separate
| subfield with the do operator and all that.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I guess you may be familiar with Judea Pearl's work
| already, but he did write a popular treatment of the
| subject in _The Book of Why_. I'm not trying to put
| computer scientists on a pedestal, but there is something
| about the uncompromising rigor that comes with putting
| abstractions inside brainless machines.
| eliasmacpherson wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, I'd read some material of his from
| the 1980s that helped me to start understanding bayesian
| networks, it inspired me to revisit my university
| statistics course which was fruitful. I am a sucker for
| pop sci!
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Sometimes it's so hard it seems almost impossible. People are
| still debating whether there is casual relationship between
| lead and violence.
| lolinder wrote:
| The average citizen doesn't need to craft casual theories,
| they need to be able to look at them critically. Yes, an
| introductory statistics course doesn't cover everything, but
| it's absolutely the 20% effort that gets 80% of the results.
| Most of the worst misinformation I've seen lately surrounding
| covid, vaccines, etc, would be solved if everyone had a basic
| understanding of introductory stats as currently taught.
|
| If we can get there, then we can talk about what we can do to
| improve things from there.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > The average citizen doesn't need to craft casual
| theories, they need to be able to look at them critically
|
| Yes, I agree, and this is precisely my point. My experience
| with introductory stats was a heavy focus on the technical
| details, when in fact what would be more effective is
| focusing on _statistical logic_.
|
| I'm specifically thinking that something like Judea Pearl's
| _The Book of Why_ would be good to introduce early in stats
| education.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think the biggest thing is whether people have a desire
| to dig deeper or not. I seems there are many people who
| just want to believe what they are told as long as it
| matches their beliefs.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Most people just want to pay the bills and put food on
| the table.
| lazide wrote:
| Anything else is harder - and for many people, impossibly
| hard. Always has been this way, likely always will be.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Most of the worst misinformation I've seen lately
| surrounding covid, vaccines, etc, would be solved if
| everyone had a basic understanding of introductory stats as
| currently taught."
|
| I think a lot of it is more ideological at the "average"
| citizen level - on both sides. Most people aren't looking
| at the data, they're believing whatever they're told that
| aligns with their personal beliefs.
| swilk wrote:
| I think you underestimate the fact that most of the people
| we are talking about are more accustomed to "magical
| thinking". Any stats education that didn't align with their
| core beliefs would be dismissed as wrong. Even if you could
| proof out everything and they had the core intellectual
| horsepower to understand there is a level of belief in
| belief that underlies their worldview that you can't
| overcome.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Most of the worst misinformation I've seen lately
| surrounding covid, vaccines, etc, would be solved if
| everyone had a basic understanding of introductory stats as
| currently taught.
|
| I don't know, most of the misinformation on the matter I've
| seen is just flat out wrong. Not misinterpreting statistics
| incorrect, just flat out lying, using false numbers or
| statements, etc. Having a cursory knowledge of statistics
| won't help you if you're incapable of Googling to check if
| a statistic is true or not.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think I agree. Instead of stats I would propose critical
| thinking. Critical thinking was one of the more engaging
| classes for me. It covered a vast array of fallacies and
| how they can be exploited in real world. I am not sure if
| it is a common requirement now, but it certainly should be.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > But it's a major in modern public discourse, and one for once
| that I'm quite willing to lay heavily at the feet of the public
| education system.
|
| Should the general population be better at such things? Yes, of
| course.
|
| However, in nearly every case such things reach a broader
| audience via mainstream media. And how many times have we seen
| those entries confuse correlation with causation? We've seen it
| so many times that it's safe to assume it's intentional.
| Surely, after each incident of such negligence a teacher or
| professor or math savvy citizen reaches out to correct them.
| Yet? Never a correction or retraction?? Never a spark of "we
| need to educate our journalists"?
|
| Repeat something often enough and it becomes truth in the minds
| of the receivers. Toss in confirmation bias and echo chambers
| and even if your better educated the masses, the media and
| those "journalists" would mitigate public's understanding.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| In addition, the entire advertising-based consumer economy is
| based on getting the potential consumer to buy the product by
| whatever means available.
|
| A public education system that creates a population
| conditioned to believe whatever any 'authority figure' says
| is also a system designed to create a population ripe for
| exploitation by advertisers. Similarly, the ideal
| authoritarian state desires a population that is generally
| ignorant and obedient, and that's what's been created in much
| of the United States.
|
| A general population that has the tools and skills needed to
| independently analyze the claims of government authority
| figures and cable TV and Internet advertisers, that's not
| what an elitist-authoritarian system desires.
|
| It's very sad to see people who completely lack these tools
| and skills attempting to do their own well-intentioned
| analysis, they're so easily manipulated by dishonest actors.
| They know enough to distrust 'authority figures', but not
| enough to conduct independent evaluations of claims. Such
| people have been sabotaged by the educational system.
| mycologos wrote:
| Is there any society of, say, 1mil+ people that 1) doesn't have
| a strong government that strictly controls information, and 2)
| has a population that doesn't have this "major [problem] in
| public discourse"? Has anybody ever pulled this off?
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| > ... there seems to be some missing BS filter where people can
| recognize something as silly if the example is silly enough but
| not in the exact same logic fail for something that seems "more
| reasonable somehow".
|
| Maybe combined with motivated reasoning.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Exactly. What it is that one wants to be true has a huge
| effect on how one interprets something.
| giantg2 wrote:
| And our justice system is largely built off of what is
| reasonable, yet it's undefined.
| LongTimeAnon wrote:
| Sounds like 13% of all silly correlations cause 50% of the
| fallacy.
| tgv wrote:
| And even then, classical null hypothesis testing is fraught
| with problems. Best stick to comparing models that explain the
| effect (instead of some default linear model where basically
| everything is correlation) and use Bayesian statistics.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Statistics is probably more useful than Calculus for just about
| everyone.
| davidgay wrote:
| Statistics and probability are formally defined using
| calculus, so that doesn't really work.
|
| Maybe basic introductory statistics is more useful than basic
| introductory calculus though.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Sure. "An average human has one breast and one testicle" -
| N.N. Taleb
| fer wrote:
| Also, most humans have more fingers than the average.
| rrobukef wrote:
| Are you sure? One in 500 babies is born with an extra
| digit.
| pie42000 wrote:
| Most will have a medical prosecute to remove it
| h2odragon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
| mihaic wrote:
| Actually, with the prelevance of polydactyly (about 1 in
| 1000 people have 6 or more fingers), and less accidents
| happening, most people might have a bellow average number
| of fingers in the future.
| johnsillings wrote:
| There is no way in hell the incidence of polydactyly is
| that high
|
| Edit: jesus christ you were right
| dwighttk wrote:
| Conclusion: we are not in hell ?
| Swizec wrote:
| The average human has more than 1 skeleton.
|
| (because of pregnancy)
| h2odragon wrote:
| and collectors
| sokoloff wrote:
| Corollary: If a human has two legs, they have an above-
| average number of legs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 77% of all statistics are made up on the spot
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Statistics and my AI class taught me it's 100%
| predictology. I mean just look at Zillow. It's the modern
| "tea leaf" reading.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree that people could have a more effective BS filter, but
| I think there's also some obligation to not publish BS in the
| first place at the risk of your trustworthiness reputation.
|
| People intentionally or repeatedly inadvertently publishing BS
| should be called out and their opinions down-weighted heavily.
|
| People having a good BS filter is one step in the chain towards
| this down-weighting, but isn't the whole chain. If anything,
| people slinging BS today are likely to gain additional reach
| and opinion-weight, rather than to lose it.
| geofft wrote:
| The post does exactly this, calling out Alex Berenson by name
| - but despite its best efforts, it will have very little
| impact on the people paying him to receive BS directly from
| his Substack.
|
| I don't think your opinion is unpopular because it's wrong.
| It's unpopular because it's empirically impractical. People
| don't suffer a reputational hit for publishing BS, and saying
| "But they should" doesn't get us anywhere (as you yourself
| point out). How do you propose that we actually cause
| reputational hits for such people?
|
| One way is to teach additional statistical literacy to the
| general public.
|
| There are probably other proposals worth trying and I'd be
| interested in hearing your takes on what they are. (One that
| might be effective - though certainly controversial - is for
| the government to say that Alex Berenson is actively putting
| lives in danger with lies and that, if the untruth of his
| statements can be proven in court, he should be subject to
| criminal penalties, just like Elizabeth Holmes is on trial
| for lying about her blood tests. But that seems a lot less
| good for society as a whole than teaching statistical
| literacy.)
| native_samples wrote:
| The moment you go down that road, every academic
| epidemiologist and COVID expert will immediately be
| prosecuted because they have repeatedly made claims that
| were totally false and which have led directly to many
| deaths. For example, the claim that lockdowns work (they
| don't and this was known before COVID times), has led
| directly to people dying due to delayed medical treatment.
| Poverty also kills of course and their
| demands/misinformation has led to that too.
|
| The same is also true of more or less the entire field of
| nutrition, none of which has yielded anything useful, and
| has resulted in governments themselves spreading
| misinformation:
|
| https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/11/27/is-saturated-
| fat-u...
|
| Incidentally, Berenson has written a long rebuttal to this
| kind of thing which you can find here:
|
| https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-english-data-on-
| vacc...
| geofft wrote:
| > _the claim that lockdowns work (they don 't and this
| was known before COVID times)_
|
| This is a bold claim and I'd be curious to see you back
| this up. By "lockdowns" - do you mean actual, genuine
| lockdowns / quarantines (mandatory stay-at-home orders,
| government-distributed emergency food packs and other
| essentials), or do you mean capacity restrictions etc.
| that get called "lockdowns" in the popular media?
|
| Note that my straw-man proposal (which I'm not seriously
| endorsing) is not that it should be prosecutable to have
| been wrong. Plenty of startups try to build something,
| and it doesn't work; they don't get prosecuted like
| Holmes. Holmes is facing prosecution for fraud, for
| knowingly telling falsehoods. If your implication is that
| academic epidemiologists, COVID experts, and the entire
| field of nutrition are all _fraudulent_ as opposed to
| merely just going through the usual course of science -
| which, to be clear, I see as mostly but not entirely
| impossible - then yes, I think we have a rather serious
| problem on our hands, which we need to figure out for the
| survival of humanity, and I 'll repeat my comment above:
| I'm very interested in knowing what proposals you have
| for solving it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't have a workable suggestion, but I agree that it's
| not government regulation of speech. It's going to be
| difficult to fix when enragement engagement is profitable
| for the platforms and the BS slingers.
|
| Elizabeth Holmes is on trial for lying about things where
| she had a specific legal obligation to tell the truth. I'd
| never heard of Alex Berenson before today, but I doubt his
| situation is one in which he's obligated to tell the truth.
| That's okay. Sunday school preachers aren't either and
| we're cool with that. We're good with the Santa and Easter
| Bunny myths.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, it is called establishing a reputation, positive or
| negative, trustworthy or untrustworthy
|
| This works well naturally in small communities, but once the
| society becomes too large, BSers, liars, and scammers can
| just move on to a new gullible crowd.
|
| So we got social media with review & reputation management
| systems, and these are now, of course, promptly gamed to the
| max. Moreover, this gaming is being done by the very people
| who should be most de-amplified, in order to amplify their
| BS, inlcuding everyone from just trolls to professional RUS
| dezinformatsiya shops (that'll gather a lot of downvotes).
|
| So yes, a huge part of the solution is to de-amplify the
| crowd that spews Bs or deliberate lies.
|
| Sure, freedom of speech is a right, but no one has to be
| required to amplify you on their platform - that takes away
| the freedom of speech of the platform owner (e.g., if HN were
| required to amplify everyone, then moderation would become
| effectively illegal).
|
| Why does this view gain downvotes so frequently? IDK, but it
| seems to be mostly readers with no nuance who think that
| freedom of speech requires zero restrictions, so any shadow
| of moderation or restriction rankles them, and they are not
| articulate enough to state a reason, but can still hit the
| down-arrow.
| indigochill wrote:
| > should be called out and their opinions down-weighted
| heavily
|
| But thinking about this from a loosely signal-process-y
| angle, once you have a BS signal in one channel that routes
| to a a particular set of minds, how does one route the
| corrective signal to that same set of minds (as opposed to,
| say, just your local friends who already agree with you
| anyway)? And even supposing you do, those minds are already
| programmed to process these signals in particular ways that
| probably means they're predisposed to accepting one or the
| other before either signal even arrives.
|
| The answer to this has always been to address the root of the
| problem, the preprogramming, through (relatively) uniform
| mass education, because that's the one and only place where
| you can (relatively) uniformly cram ideas into everyone's
| brain before they scatter to the winds and begin fancying
| themselves "free thinkers".
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you integrate over time, an erroneous signal (a stray
| bit of noise) can still result in a few minds here and
| there having the wrong information. That's not ideal, but
| it's unavoidable and not catastrophic so long as the source
| of the bad information systemically has reduced amplitude
| next time.
|
| Right now, sources of bad information get systemically
| louder, not quieter, over time. That's way worse.
| [deleted]
| pstuart wrote:
| I think we teach math wrong -- it's taught like everybody is
| going to go the distance with it, whereas that's a small
| minority.
|
| We should teach math _literacy_ -- how to use math to
| understand the world we live in, e.g. some stats as you
| mentioned, basic finance (the glories of compound interest),
| sizing stuff, etc.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I would go as far as sacrificing calculus and vectors for stats
| classes if it came to a showdown.
|
| There's an absolute jungle of information we're presented with
| each day, and clearly many people would just straight up buy
| the vaccines-cause-death statistics uncritically.
|
| There's no critical thinking without critical stats. How are
| the numbers made, what do they mean? Just about every field
| requires you to understand this, especially the social science
| fields where we're talking about some quite substantial issues
| like replication crisis. Things like economics as well, they're
| things everyone wants to understand but we don't give people
| the tools.
|
| Somehow we have also missed out causality, when we've had the
| tools for a while. I reckon it's actually quite teachable
| though it currently feels like an advanced subject due to
| historical quirks.
| DarylZero wrote:
| I took high school statistics. I don't think it really had the
| kind of effect on students that you're going for.
|
| Statistics like any math class was just another pointless and
| imposed game of symbol manipulation, for most. Not something
| that affects how they see the world or how they process
| disinformation (which disables rational thinking by appeals to
| emotion, so rational capabilities aren't necessarily even the
| issue).
|
| Humans are naturally using statistical type reasoning all the
| time and are very good at it. But when it comes to things like
| in-group out-group consensus-forming conformity mechanisms, the
| whole point is they _overcome rationality_ for social cohesion.
| To follow rationality instead of the group, you have to leave
| the group, which is unthinkable, so your mind prevents you from
| thinking it long enough to change your mind, by emotional
| terminations.
| newsbinator wrote:
| The best (and only) thing I learned in high school statistics
| is that no matter how many times you flip a coin, each flip
| has an equal chance of landing on heads or tails.
| aj7 wrote:
| That's huge though.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A _fair_ coin.
|
| It is important because if you flip a coin 20 times and get
| 20 tails, there is probably something fishy with that coin
| and you probably should bet tails. If it is 100 out of 100
| (or even 95 out of 100), there is effectively zero chance
| that the coin is fair.
|
| This can be modeled using Bayesian statistics. You start by
| assuming with a reasonably high probability that the coin
| is fair, then you revise your assumptions as you get more
| and more data.
|
| The general idea is: if a coin flip lands on tails for too
| many times, you should probably bet on tails. You shouldn't
| try that in casinos: games are seriously checked for
| fairness (of course, the rules make it so that the house
| has an edge). But in an informal setting, it can get you a
| small advantage.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| But the lesson isn't how to tell whether a coin is fair.
| The lesson is that in independent events such as coin
| flips, lottery draws, roulette or slot machine spins,
| rolls of the dice, etc., past outcomes don't predict
| future outcomes. If people understood this they would not
| spend hours at gaming tables and machines, because the
| odds (in favor of the house) are exactly the same for
| your 100th pull of the lever as they were for the first
| one, and the more you play the more likely it is that you
| lose, not win.
| bnralt wrote:
| That's been my observation as well. Feeding people more
| information or giving them more tools often doesn't change
| their minds, it just gives them more ways to argue a position
| that was decided upon by the beginning. This shouldn't be a
| surprise; almost no one who advocates these solutions thinks
| that it will change their own views on [HOT TOPIC OF THE
| DAY], but rather that that everyone else will come to agree
| with their own pre-determined position.
|
| Another solution might be convincing people to not pay
| attention to so many hot botton issues and not turn
| everything into a debate. A certain amount of detachment is
| probably more healthy for individuals and for the society.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I also encountered recently a chart indicating that all causes
| mortality is higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. It
| was clear to me, but not to the casual theater, that the median
| vaccinated individual is much older than the unvaccinated
| individual, and older adults tend to die more frequently than
| younger adults.
| [deleted]
| StringyBob wrote:
| As just discussed on the wonderful BBC radio show more or less -
| available as a podcast and also published online at
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b6j20n
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Great, but are we just gonna forget all of this when reading
| "data-backed" social justice activist claims?
| User23 wrote:
| Why is the ghostbusters graph obviously just a photoshop
| relabeling of the covid vaccine graph?
|
| > I have checked the underlying dataset myself and the graph
| plotted above [the photoshopped one] is correct. People under 60
| who watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are twice as likely to
| die as people who watched the 2021 Ghostbusters movie. The
| overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal.
|
| The poster of this article is observably a liar. Perhaps there is
| some kind of point to be made here, but I'll wait until someone
| honest attempts to present it.
| brokensegue wrote:
| The first part is a joke... Keep reading and you'll get it
| henvic wrote:
| Fooled by randomness.
| api wrote:
| This sort of thing is why "do your own research" is simply not
| plausible advice for 99% of people, even highly educated
| intelligent people with time on their hands.
|
| Most of the high level problems in our civilization require years
| of study to even be capable of formulating a valid opinion.
|
| The thing people have to do is to instead focus on evaluating
| people and deciding who probably knows who they are talking
| about. This is the same thing successful leaders and managers
| have to do when they hire. Unfortunately there is no foolproof
| method. Going with the consensus in a field is going to yield
| better than average results, but it's not a perfect rule by any
| means.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| My take is opposite. Everybody with a bit of common sense would
| see such claims as problematic immediately and so they can dive
| deeper into the stuff. The problem is so much easier to explain
| if one uses the visual approach with proportional boxes for
| each age group. Single metric (projection) can distort a multi-
| dimensional data significantly, everyone knows that. But
| unfortunately people make the same mistake again all the time.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Agreed. No one needs to become an expert in every possible
| field.
|
| What we do need to do is educate people out of new forms of
| innumeracy and illiteracy, where they are falling prey to
| basic fallacies of statistics or rhetorical tricks like motte
| and bailey and cat couplings.
|
| People are generally familiar with logical fallacies like ad
| hominem, strawman arguments, or circular reasoning. New
| weapons of persuasion are getting crafted every day; we owe
| it to ourselves, each other, and the future humans to educate
| them on defense against the dark arts.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Sounds good in theory but what about those who've fallen so
| hopelessly down the rabbit hole? I've pointed out the
| statistical flaws in the tweets and Instagram posts they
| send me, often there's an "aha" moment. But then they'll
| find another article from a questionable source or tweet
| from some "data scientist" misrepresenting data from John's
| Hopkins and the process begins all over again. Debunking
| the same nonsense over and over again is exhausting.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _But unfortunately people make the same mistake again all
| the time._ "
|
| Exactly what the previous comment said.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > evaluating people and deciding who probably knows who they
| are talking about
|
| This is hard, possibly just as hard as "doing your own
| research".
| _jal wrote:
| Take the "Do your own research" slogan for what it is - an
| attack on expertise.
|
| It is an attempt to lower the status, and presumably power, of
| "the elites" (credentialed experts), mostly perpetrated by the
| real (monied) elites.
| mcguire wrote:
| On the contrary, most of the people making the "do your own
| research" attack on expertise are not "elites" in any sense.
| They're the same people who say, "I could have been an X
| except for all the pointless math/science".
|
| The wealthy or semi-wealthy are either riding the wave for
| their own benefit or don't like what the expertise says.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| Wow that seemed like a lot of effort to make a point. Often
| twitter oversimplifies things, but that could legitimately have
| been a tweet of the offending graph and a few words about how
| older/sick people are more likely to have been vaccinated, and
| also more likely to die because they're old/sick.
|
| I do like the original Ghostbusters movie, but I'm not sure that
| really added to the effect for me.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Changing minds with humor is better than making points in the
| echo chamber.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| I guess you found it funnier than me, but making points
| seemed like a huge part of that article.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| I'm not opposed to making points.
|
| I'm commenting on the relative merit of the craft and
| thoughtfulness and humor that went into the attempt.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| Agree to disagree I guess, but I have read a lot of
| things on Twitter that I found interesting and useful
| (amongst a lot of crap, obviously), and this I didn't
| like.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Similar examples in the social sciences include systematic bias
| in the preparation and administration of IQ tests to different
| groups of people (see Charles Murray's 'Bell Curve' vs. Stephen
| J. Gould's 'The Mismeasure of Man').
|
| FYI, Gould's (infamous) "The Mismeasure of Man" has been widely
| discredited among intelligence researchers and is considered a
| textbook example of an anti-science, propagandistic work, even
| denying basic things like brain evolution, whereas Murray's _Bell
| Curve_ has held up pretty well in the sciences (being hated, of
| course on the humanities side), and his latest _Human Diversity_
| , is a good overview of the state of the art, with 50% of the
| book being footnotes. There has been a lot discovered since
| Gould's _Mismeasure_ was published, and all of it bad news for
| Gould and good news for Murray.
|
| The insistence, by some, that evolution only works from the neck
| down, remains a persistent anti-scientific belief and as Jonathan
| Haidt points out, the main source of science-denying on the left.
| There are always a stream of people like Gould who try to defend
| this position by mocking/caricature the opposing side, but that
| is not considered good science.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. We
| don't need a thread like this to veer into yet another race-IQ
| war.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369974.
|
| Also, your account appears to be using HN primarily for
| ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of
| which ideology they're battling for, because it's destructive
| of the core value of this site (intellectual curiosity). If you
| wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking
| to the intended use of HN, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask
| you about this before, so please fix this.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| OK, fair enough, Dang!
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The insistence, by some, that evolution only works from the
| neck down, remains a persistent anti-scientific belief and as
| Jonathan Haidt points out, the main source of science-denying
| on the left.
|
| Well, at least we know where you stand on that subject then. It
| may be a source of science denying on the left, I'm not aware
| of that but I am aware that it is is a main source of racism
| from the rabid right.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > It may be a source of science denying on the left, I'm not
| aware of that but I am aware that it is is a main source of
| racism from the rabid right.
|
| This attitude is really not helpful. Science is never racist.
| It may not meet your expectations, but that's something each
| individual needs to come to grips with, it's not a reason to
| deny science, especially something touching very important
| policy questions -- e.g. is it true that the SAT test is
| racist because it highlights group differences?
|
| That's a question that science can answer, and throwing
| around wild accusations of racism against everyone who tries
| to study this issue objectively does not promote public
| policy or science. That leads to a society in which key
| policy initiatives are based on a denial of human nature.
|
| And here there is a special problem with the (historical)
| left because going back to Rousseau and certainly through
| Hegel and his admirers, there is a belief that human nature
| is fundamentally malleable and plastic. That everyone is made
| of the same soft clay that can be molded by education. But
| this is just false. And science is clear that it's false. Yet
| denying this basic truth of human nature leads to terrible
| education and social policies. And we are seeing this play
| out with significant human damage in California's education
| policy. Large numbers of lower income students are being
| harmed because people in California's education bureaucracy
| continue to deny science.
|
| So please pay attention to what is true, rather than focusing
| on whether certain scientific conclusions are culturally
| acceptable to you.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Actually I read both books years ago and "The Mismeasure of
| Man" was far more sound in its analysis. In particular the
| biases in IQ testing were made very clear in Gould's work.
|
| My take on what the Charles Murray crowd (and its antecedents
| dating back to Francis Galton's Social Darwinism) is that it's
| just an attempt to justify the social status quo based on
| 'genetic superiority of the ruling class'. This is merely a
| replacement for the previous (and completely discredited)
| religious justification for the social status quo, i.e. priests
| telling the serfs and slaves that 'The gods have blessed the
| divine kings'. We also have the economists getting in on the
| game, telling everyone that gross wealth disparity is the
| inevitable result of pure econometric theory and so on.
|
| For other hilarious takes on this, I always point to the "Nobel
| Prize Sperm Bank"[1]
|
| [1] https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/what-ever-happened-to-the-
| mys...
| rsj_hn wrote:
| So notice how quickly blank-slate side devolves into
| politics, questioning motives, casting dark aspersions, etc.
|
| The reason is that they don't feel comfortable talking about
| the science, and so this is all a form of science-denial.
|
| If you care at all about what is real, as opposed to fighting
| political battles, you may want to read up on the current
| state of the art. _Human Diversity_ is a great read, but if
| you are short of time, there are lots of scientific articles
| out there - check out the tweet stream summarizing the data
| with links to the current research here:
|
| https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1211170458902487042
|
| Unfortunately trying to get people to look at scientific
| questions using scientific methodology is as hard as trying
| to convince a creationist.
|
| They are simply not going to listen and will accuse you of
| being a bad person, etc.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| But I can tell you why the bowl of cereal that is put in front of
| me always correlates to it disappearing.
| microdrum wrote:
| He is referring to a statistical quantization mistake that the
| target, COVID lockdown critic Alex Berenson, did not make.
| czzr wrote:
| But he did make that mistake? Can you explain what you mean?
| [deleted]
| EarlKing wrote:
| Betteridge's Law of headlines says.... NO.
|
| There. Saved you a click.
| jmull wrote:
| _Whoosh!_
|
| Hey, what was that?
| kriro wrote:
| I'd really be interested in a good source to develop a better
| intuitive understanding for statistics (ideally with datasets +
| jupyter notebooks or something). I use statistics, I can work
| with statistics (even fairly complicated things) but it always
| feels a bit "painful" and unnatural. I'd really love to develop a
| more natural feeling for statistics.
| he0001 wrote:
| According to the author the Ghostbuster post is a joke. Author
| states so in a more recent article https://www.covid-
| datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...
| jjk166 wrote:
| Missed title opportunity: "Do Ghostbusters Cause Ghosts?"
| d1a2n wrote:
| Haha yeah that's pretty funny man confounding variables, am I
| right? Still not getting vaccinated lol
| lr1970 wrote:
| Ya, right. And 99% of everyone in UK who died from COVID (of all
| genders and age groups) were eating bread while alive. Eating
| bread is a great predictor of COVID mortality! </end_of_sarcasm>
| guilhas wrote:
| This article is like the factcheckers fact checking a similar
| irrelevant thing to avoid having to investigate the real issue
| nicoburns wrote:
| I'm seeing a slight upward trend in the "1 dose" line (indeed
| just crossing the "unvaccinated" line in a latest month), but
| the "2 doses" line is much lower than both, and doesn't seem to
| be changing much.
| guilhas wrote:
| You're totally right, misread the chart. Edited all out
| unless I find the weekly report
|
| Still why would people with 1 dose be dying more than
| unvaccinated?
| phonypc wrote:
| What chart for October and November? Your link only goes to
| 24th September and says it's the latest release.
|
| Edit: this comment and others now appear to be nonsensical
| because OP essentially replaced their comment with an entirely
| different one.
| afavour wrote:
| > This article is like the factcheckers fact checking a similar
| irrelevant thing to avoid having to investigate the real issue
|
| No. This article is like factcheckers satirically explaining
| how statistics work to an author that clearly has no clue. In
| fact it's not _like_ that, it _is_ that.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Sorry I am confused about which removed chart I'm supposed to
| see here. If you are talking about "3. Weekly mortality rates
| for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) by vaccination
| status" then it's in no way clear to me that your conclusion is
| correct. First, the fully vaccinated line is the lowest there.
| I can definitely see a correlation between people getting their
| first shot, getting adventurous because they feel safe, and
| then catching COVID that they aren't prepared for because they
| aren't fully vaccinated. Also this chart isn't separated by
| populations. That is the mortality rate isn't "per 100,000
| fully/partially/un-vaccinated". It's per 100,000 total. Which
| means that as the total number of unvaccinated people declines
| so does that particular mortality rate. If everyone was
| vaccinated and people still died from COVID then of course only
| the vaccinated would die, right?
| Borrible wrote:
| Not that many people on HN seem to be interested in spurious
| correlations.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I like the irony of suggesting that search result demonstrates
| "what many people on HN seem to be interested in," when talking
| about spurious correlations.
| Borrible wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. We should make a test or something...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Oh you meant to suggest whether most people on HN were
| interested in a book titled _Spurious Correlations_? I
| guess that's the bulk of those search results too, that
| specific book. You should have put it in caps to indicate
| it is a title. I'm still not sure whether what happened to
| one post somehow proves whether or not "many people on HN
| are interested in" even that book, let alone the topic in
| general, but I am impressed by your confidence in your
| research methods.
| Borrible wrote:
| The irony of being taken seriously does not escape me.You
| can perhaps correlate my amazement.
| fghab wrote:
| Creatively using statistics happens on both sides. Example: "Case
| statistics show us that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated!"
|
| But due to the 3g rule (access to events or buildings is granted
| to the vaccinated, recovered or _people with a PCR test less than
| 24h ago_ ) in countries like Germany, guess which group is tested
| most: The unvaccinated. Other groups do not need tests!
| maxerickson wrote:
| Many of those statements are about the relative numbers of
| infected people in hospitals.
|
| There could be value in reducing spread due to vaccinated
| people (depending on how much of it there is, as you say, we
| don't have good surveillance of it), but there's lots of value
| in reducing hospitalizations, and that's what many of those
| statements are about.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Actually, the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" is also supported
| by their over-representation in hospital admissions and deaths.
|
| https://lawrence-robinson.medium.com/vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-hosp...
|
| "A study done by the CDC in New York accounted for the
| following -- "A total of 1,271 new COVID-19 hospitalizations
| (0.17 per 100,000 person-days) occurred among fully vaccinated
| adults, compared with 7,308 (2.03 per 100,000 person-days)
| among unvaccinated adults"."
| jkonline wrote:
| <soapbox>
|
| > I don't know how to explain this other than movie-caused
| mortality.
|
| The above sentence alone gets my Skepticism antennae whirling,
| let alone the majority of the (relatively unassociated) facts.
|
| What the heck is movie-caused mortality?
|
| An exact search[0^] returns this same HN post, no help there.
|
| An inexact search[1^] returns results mainly about deaths that
| occurred during the filming of a movie or TV show. These deaths
| are very much not the point the OP is trying to make.
|
| Issue #1): the sentence quoted above is non-sensical, as the OP's
| purported method for "how to explain this," doesn't explain
| anything, let alone anything related to the point OP is trying to
| make.
|
| Issue #2): Even if "movie-caused mortality" was a valid
| explanation... Not knowing how to explain something doesn't allow
| one to arrive at _any_ conclusion (other than, "the thing can
| not be explained," pedantically speaking).
|
| Frankly, it makes as much (as little!) sense as, "I don't know
| how to explain this other than time-traveling telepathic murder
| bots."
|
| </soapbox>
|
| [0^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22movie-caused+mortality%22
| [1^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=movie-caused+mortality
| k2enemy wrote:
| Might want to re-read the article. I think this one flew way
| over your head. Unless your comment is satire, in which case
| your comment flew over my head.
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