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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?

#161

Post by photochemsyn »

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…

Actually I read both books years ago and "The Mismeasure of Man" was far more sound in its analysis. In particular the biases in IQ testing were made very clear in Gould's work.

My take on what the Charles Murray crowd (and its antecedents dating back to Francis Galton's Social Darwinism) is that it's just an attempt to justify the social status quo based on 'genetic superiority of the ruling class'. This is merely a replacement for the previous (and completely discredited) religious justification for the social status quo, i.e. priests telling the serfs and slaves that 'The gods have blessed the divine kings'. We also have the economists getting in on the game, telling everyone that gross wealth disparity is the inevitable result of pure econometric theory and so on.

For other hilarious takes on this, I always point to the "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank"[1]

[1] https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/what-ever-happened-to-the-mys...

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#162

Post by lazide »

giantg2 wrote: post #131
jkhdigital wrote: post #123

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, 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.

Anything else is harder - and for many people, impossibly hard. Always has been this way, likely always will be.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#163

Post by jacksonkmarley »

mattcwilson wrote: post #113
jacksonkmarley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree to disagree I guess, but I have read a lot of things on Twitter that I found interesting and useful (amongst a lot of crap, obviously), and this I didn't like.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#164

Post by t0mas88 »

lbj wrote: post #151

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 dieha…

There is a huge spike in active cases right before and after Dec 11th. More cases = more deaths.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#165

Post by Borrible »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #148
Borrible wrote: post #111

Not 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.

Yeah, you're right. We should make a test or something...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#167

Post by kriro »

I'd really be interested in a good source to develop a better intuitive understanding for statistics (ideally with datasets + jupyter notebooks or something). I use statistics, I can work with statistics (even fairly complicated things) but it always feels a bit "painful" and unnatural. I'd really love to develop a more natural feeling for statistics.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#169

Post by hedora »

josho wrote: post #125
jkhdigital wrote: post #114

I 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.

Care to explain what you mean?

Not the person you are responding to, but I challenge you to find a single COVID related article making the social media rounds that demonstrates a reasonable understanding of conditional probabilities, and presents data in a clear, level-headed, unbiased fashion.

For instance, this article has a silly example of confounding variables (which ghostbusters you watched as a child is correlated to your age, and age is correlated to covid mortality).

It proceeds to present two graphs “debunking” an anti-vax conspiracy. The first graph specifically controls for age, vaccination rates, and size of population.

After preventing strong evidence to the contrary, the article then implies the conspiracy theory made the same mistake as the ghostbusters analysis. It provides an incomprehensible graph as evidence.

So, F’s in Statistics 101 for everyone.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#170

Post by jkonline »

> I don't know how to explain this other than movie-caused mortality.

The above sentence alone gets my Skepticism antennae whirling, let alone the majority of the (relatively unassociated) facts.

What the heck is movie-caused mortality?

An exact search[0^] returns this same HN post, no help there.

An inexact search[1^] returns results mainly about deaths that occurred during the filming of a movie or TV show. These deaths are very much not the point the OP is trying to make.

Issue #1): the sentence quoted above is non-sensical, as the OP's purported method for "how to explain this," doesn't explain anything, let alone anything related to the point OP is trying to make.

Issue #2): Even if "movie-caused mortality" was a valid explanation... Not knowing how to explain something doesn't allow one to arrive at any conclusion (other than, "the thing can not be explained," pedantically speaking).

Frankly, it makes as much (as little!) sense as, "I don't know how to explain this other than time-traveling telepathic murder bots."

[0^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22movie-caused+mortality%22 [1^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=movie-caused+mortality

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