Missed title opportunity: "Do Ghostbusters Cause Ghosts?"
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
141–150 of 248 posts
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#142Earlier 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?
An audience is an audience.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#143global average temperature vs number of pirates: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/...
My god. It's linear!
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#144Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#145I ... walks away from conversation...
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#146Why 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…
The first part is a joke... Keep reading and you'll get it
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#147Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#148Not 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
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#149This 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…
> 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 tha…
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.
Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s huge though.