Not that many people on HN seem to be interested in spurious correlations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
111–120 of 248 posts
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its so so clearly a joke. Come on man.
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.
Using the real data is the nice part of many xkcd posts, for example https://xkcd.com/893/
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#114I 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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#115This 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 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 iss…
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#116I'm not sure why this sort of thing impresses people, it's obvious the 1984 ghostbuster group skews old.
That's the point? It's satire
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#117As Benjamin Disraeli said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#118Earlier 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?
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, most humans have more fingers than the average.
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.
There is no way in hell the incidence of polydactyly is that high
Edit: jesus christ you were right
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gl…
> 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?