Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#191

Post by ohwellhere » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

calibas wrote: post #160

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.

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…

I share this criticism. It's almost like you have to scream at people that although correlation doesn't imply _direct_ causation, it most certainly does imply some causal chain.

Ruling out chance through significance and power, what phenomenon in the world is correlated without being causally related _somehow_?

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#192

Post by rsj_hn » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #161

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…

So notice how quickly blank-slate side devolves into politics, questioning motives, casting dark aspersions, etc.

The reason is that they don't feel comfortable talking about the science, and so this is all a form of science-denial.

If you care at all about what is real, as opposed to fighting political battles, you may want to read up on the current state of the art. Human Diversity is a great read, but if you are short of time, there are lots of scientific articles out there - check out the tweet stream summarizing the data with links to the current research here:

https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1211170458902487042

Unfortunately trying to get people to look at scientific questions using scientific methodology is as hard as trying to convince a creationist.

They are simply not going to listen and will accuse you of being a bad person, etc.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#193

Post by jmull » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

EarlKing wrote: post #139

Betteridge's Law of headlines says.... NO. There. Saved you a click.

Whoosh!

Hey, what was that?

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#194

Post by paganel » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #100

paganel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Beautiful country to be “trapped” in. Lots of amazing parks and mountains and caves and beaches and volcanos everywhere. I’ve been tempted to “trap” myself there for a couple of decades now. It’s such a prison that billionaires are voluntarily securing land and building mansions in case the whole world goes tits up. Such a terrible place. /s https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val... (Note: I’m a…

I didn't say anything about New Zealand being ugly or whatever, I did say that (from my perspective) the freedom of movement of its citizens across the border was severely limited, hence the "prison" term.

Yes, I know that (most probably) New Zealanders were perfectly free to go out to another country had they wished to do so, but once there they couldn't have come back (unless they were a multi-billionaire like the Google guy), I regard that as a prison-like system, because it majorly forces you to remain put (most probably your family, your job, your everything are located in New Zealand, you don't want to give them away). Yes, it is a system that saved lives, but nevertheless it is a system that restricted the freedom of movement of its citizens for almost two years now.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#195

Post by eliasmacpherson » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

jkhdigital wrote: post #183

jmugan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you may be familiar with Judea Pearl’s work already, but he did write a popular treatment of the subject in The Book of Why . I’m not trying to put computer scientists on a pedestal, but there is something about the uncompromising rigor that comes with putting abstractions inside brainless machines.

Thanks for the tip, I'd read some material of his from the 1980s that helped me to start understanding bayesian networks, it inspired me to revisit my university statistics course which was fruitful. I am a sucker for pop sci!

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#196

Post by mycologos » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Is there any society of, say, 1mil+ people that 1) doesn't have a strong government that strictly controls information, and 2) has a population that doesn't have this "major [problem] in public discourse"? Has anybody ever pulled this off?

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#197

Post by rsj_hn » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #157

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.

> 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.

This attitude is really not helpful. Science is never racist. It may not meet your expectations, but that's something each individual needs to come to grips with, it's not a reason to deny science, especially something touching very important policy questions -- e.g. is it true that the SAT test is racist because it highlights group differences?

That's a question that science can answer, and throwing around wild accusations of racism against everyone who tries to study this issue objectively does not promote public policy or science. That leads to a society in which key policy initiatives are based on a denial of human nature.

And here there is a special problem with the (historical) left because going back to Rousseau and certainly through Hegel and his admirers, there is a belief that human nature is fundamentally malleable and plastic. That everyone is made of the same soft clay that can be molded by education. But this is just false. And science is clear that it's false. Yet denying this basic truth of human nature leads to terrible education and social policies. And we are seeing this play out with significant human damage in California's education policy. Large numbers of lower income students are being harmed because people in California's education bureaucracy continue to deny science.

So please pay attention to what is true, rather than focusing on whether certain scientific conclusions are culturally acceptable to you.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#198

Post by cronix » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

Ginden wrote: post #91

nanna wrote: post #12

Nice example of 'correlation does not imply causation' and if you submit this kinda thing to me in my data analysis class I'll fail you.

But if you submit that to scientifical journal it will be published. ;)

It worked for Hitler's Mein Kampf by just changing a few words using "feminist" language, and even won some special recognition from the publishers.

> Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote 20 articles that promoted deliberately absurd ideas or morally questionable acts and submitted them to various peer-reviewed journals. Although they had planned for the project to run until January 2019, the trio admitted to the hoax in October 2018 after journalists from The Wall Street Journal revealed that "Helen Wilson", the pseudonym used for their article published in Gender, Place & Culture, did not exist. By the time of the reveal, 4 of their 20 papers had been published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review. Included among the articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language.[2][4] The first of these had won special recognition from the journal that published it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

> Mein Kampf and intersectional feminism aren’t usually lumped together in many people’s minds, but if linked with the right language and buzzwords, left-wing academic publications apparently will accept the combination as scholarship.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/3/grievance-st...

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#199

Post by tjpnz » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

mattcwilson wrote: post #68

sinuhe69 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is opposite. Everybody with a bit of common sense would see such claims as problematic immediately and so they can dive deeper into the stuff. The problem is so much easier to explain if one uses the visual approach with proportional boxes for each age group. Single metric (projection) can distort a multi-dimensional data significantly, everyone knows that. But unfortunately people make the same mistake again…

Agreed. No one needs to become an expert in every possible field. What we do need to do is educate people out of new forms of innumeracy and illiteracy, where they are falling prey to basic fallacies of statistics or rhetorical tricks like motte and bailey and cat couplings. People are generally familiar with logical fallacies like ad hominem, strawman arguments, or circular reasoning. New weapons of persuasion are g…

Sounds good in theory but what about those who've fallen so hopelessly down the rabbit hole? I've pointed out the statistical flaws in the tweets and Instagram posts they send me, often there's an "aha" moment. But then they'll find another article from a questionable source or tweet from some "data scientist" misrepresenting data from John's Hopkins and the process begins all over again. Debunking the same nonsense over and over again is exhausting.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#200

Post by dang » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. We don't need a thread like this to veer into yet another race-IQ war.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369974.

Also, your account appears to be using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because it's destructive of the core value of this site (intellectual curiosity). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the intended use of HN, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you about this before, so please fix this.