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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?

#151

Post by lbj »

Excellent analogy. I wonder if someone would be kind enough to shed some light on this graph: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/

If you scroll down to "Total Coronavirus Deaths" and click near the middle on December 11th, you'll notice a very rapid increase in deaths. December 11th was when we started vaccinating against covid.

I'm not saying that the vax is killing people, but this is a diehard argument from those who are negative against the covid vaccine.

What could a reasonable explanation be?

PS: Someone filed for more insight with our national institute of health (SSI) and they replied that following the first shots in December 2020, about 4.500 people died within 30 days. This is generally understood to be because the group we vaccinated first was already above the mean expected age, so their time was already up so to speak, ie. death could have been caused by anything, including old age.

I think it only caught the attention of the mainstream, because in all of 2020 we had a total of 1.250 "deaths with covid" whereof about 1.000 of these had more than 2 co-morbidities.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#154

Post by motohagiography »

Imo, this is the level of discourse we need on vaccine efficacy, risk, and data. It's funny and demonstrates some mastery of the concept of the sample bias behind it.

When 80% of the population is vaccinated, the base rate of dying of anything at all carries over with them as people change their own status from one category to the next, creating a false causality link between the base rate of dying anyway and their status change to vaccinated. I'd say now do covid and its variants, but regardless, well done.

We need smarter and more compelling people making these cases for important things instead of feeding lines to actors and poli-sci bureaucrats on television. The hardest part of the pandemic I think will have been establishments everywhere realizing that people thought they were too dumb to be believed. One of my favorite Holzer truisms is, "A lack of charisma can be fatal," and I when I look at how this has played out, it's because the people announcing information and policies couldn't be taken seriously by 30%+ of the population even when they were telling the truth - which, unfortunately, was less than the whole time as well.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#155

Post by jrochkind1 »

paganel wrote: post #78
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…

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 lik…

What is a "reverse" open-air prison, what part of imprisonment are you suggesting is reversed?

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#157

Post by jacquesm »

rsj_hn wrote: post #133

> 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…

> 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.

Well, at least we know where you stand on that subject then. It may be a source of science denying on the left, I'm not aware of that but I am aware that it is is a main source of racism from the rabid right.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#158

Post by bnralt »

DarylZero wrote: post #70
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 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…

That's been my observation as well. Feeding people more information or giving them more tools often doesn't change their minds, it just gives them more ways to argue a position that was decided upon by the beginning. This shouldn't be a surprise; almost no one who advocates these solutions thinks that it will change their own views on [HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY], but rather that that everyone else will come to agree with their own pre-determined position.

Another solution might be convincing people to not pay attention to so many hot botton issues and not turn everything into a debate. A certain amount of detachment is probably more healthy for individuals and for the society.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#159

Post by jrochkind1 »

JuliusBranson wrote: post #116
assbuttbuttass wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The OP article I read did not not seem to be a critique of statistics or the scientific method?

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#160

Post by calibas »

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.

I don't get this attitude, if things are correlated, it should at least make a scientist wonder why. It certainly could be random chance, but correlation can also lead to establishing a causal model or discovering a third variable. If two things keep happening in conjunction, it at least merits further investigation.

It seems like there's this extreme reaction against people behaving like correlation equals causation, but instead of over-emphasizing correlation, it gets dismissed entirely.

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