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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

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Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#131

Post by giantg2 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #123
lolinder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

> 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 ear…

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#132

Post by ertian »

CheckBlanket wrote: post #81

Yes, smugly mocking people's very valid concerns will surely win them over. Don't study the figures, just do as we say!

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#133

Post by rsj_hn »

> 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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#134

Post by giantg2 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #17
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…

> … 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.

And our justice system is largely built off of what is reasonable, yet it's undefined.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#135

Post by sofixa »

lolinder wrote: post #108
jkhdigital wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. I…

> 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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#138

Post by jkhdigital »

lordnacho wrote: post #106
jkhdigital wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sema…

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 conc…

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.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#140

Post by jmugan »

jkhdigital wrote: post #75
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.

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.
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