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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

covid-datascience.com

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Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#41

Post by sinuhe69 »

api wrote: post #18

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.…

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#42

Post by everybodyknows »

Tade0 wrote: post #13

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?area…

> ... 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...

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#45

Post by indigochill »

sokoloff wrote: post #27
xoa wrote: post #14

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 on…

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 chai…

> 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".

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#46

Post by LudwigNagasena »

300bps wrote: post #20
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often, but not in this case, hence my comment.

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.

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#47

Post by AzzieElbab »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #25
xoa wrote: post #14

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 on…

Statistics is probably more useful than Calculus for just about everyone.

Sure. “An average human has one breast and one testicle” - N.N. Taleb

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#48

Post by sokoloff »

indigochill wrote: post #45
sokoloff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chai…

> 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 programme…

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#49

Post by afavour »

guilhas wrote: post #30

This article is like the factcheckers fact checking a similar irrelevant thing to avoid having to investigate the real issue

> 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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#50

Post by emodendroket »

OJFord wrote: post #38

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...

Berenson is one of the most prominent deniers, previously famous for his claims about marijuana being far more dangerous than commonly believed.
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