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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?

#71

Post by everybodyknows »

ctdonath wrote: post #36
tejohnso wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes; interesting that they never bring up the chart showing we’re at the peak of a natural 125,000 year temperature cycle.

Source? The long temperature graphs I've seen look quite irregular, rather than cyclical.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#72

Post by fer »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #47
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Also, most humans have more fingers than the average.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#73

Post by jacksonkmarley »

mattcwilson wrote: post #55
_p4lt wrote: post #53

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.

Changing minds with humor is better than making points in the echo chamber.

I guess you found it funnier than me, but making points seemed like a huge part of that article.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#74

Post by cldellow »

OJFord wrote: post #62
cldellow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

What's the motivation for that? Infamy?

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.)

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#75

Post by jkhdigital »

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 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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#77

Post by dylan604 »

tux1968 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#78

Post by paganel »

cldellow wrote: post #56
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...

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 t…

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).

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#79

Post by maxerickson »

fghab wrote: post #65

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!

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#80

Post by morsch »

everybodyknows wrote: post #71
ctdonath wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; interesting that they never bring up the chart showing we’re at the peak of a natural 125,000 year temperature cycle.

Source? The long temperature graphs I've seen look quite irregular, rather than cyclical.

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...

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