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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?

#211

Post by throwawayboise »

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.

Exactly. What it is that one wants to be true has a huge effect on how one interprets something.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#212

Post by native_samples »

geofft wrote: post #82
sokoloff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that people could have a more effective BS filter, but I think there’s also some obligation to not publish BS in the first place at the risk of your trustworthiness reputation. People intentionally or repeatedly inadvertently publishing BS should be called out and their opinions down-weighted heavily. People having a good BS filter is one step in the chain towards this down-weighting, but isn’t the whole chai…

The post does exactly this, calling out Alex Berenson by name - but despite its best efforts, it will have very little impact on the people paying him to receive BS directly from his Substack. I don't think your opinion is unpopular because it's wrong. It's unpopular because it's empirically impractical. People don't suffer a reputational hit for publishing BS, and saying "But they should" doesn't get us anywhere (as…

The moment you go down that road, every academic epidemiologist and COVID expert will immediately be prosecuted because they have repeatedly made claims that were totally false and which have led directly to many deaths. For example, the claim that lockdowns work (they don't and this was known before COVID times), has led directly to people dying due to delayed medical treatment. Poverty also kills of course and their demands/misinformation has led to that too.

The same is also true of more or less the entire field of nutrition, none of which has yielded anything useful, and has resulted in governments themselves spreading misinformation:

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/11/27/is-saturated-fat-u...

Incidentally, Berenson has written a long rebuttal to this kind of thing which you can find here:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-english-data-on-vacc...

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#213

Post by throwawayboise »

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.

Most people just want to pay the bills and put food on the table.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#214

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

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…

There is a scale of certainty with causality. Evidently we aren't always good at expressing the difference between light evidence of causality and heavy evidence of causality. Do we have the right words? Are we using them?

So in other words, several of the commenters here are right. On the one hand we shouldn't jump to conclusions, but on the other hand we should listen to the clues.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#215

Post by jrochkind1 »

oxfeed65261 wrote: post #182
jrochkind1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not the GP, but I believe they mean that it keeps outsiders out rather than keeping insiders in.

I see. It's currently pretty darn hard for most of the world to get into the US, is the US also a "reverse open-air prison", which alarms the poster? Really, it's been almost impossible for the majority of the population of the planet to get into the USA before the pandemic. Most of the world would be thrilled if they could come if they quarantine for two weeks.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#216

Post by jrochkind1 »

Borrible wrote: post #165
jrochkind1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh you meant to suggest whether most people on HN were interested in a book titled _Spurious Correlations_? I guess that's the bulk of those search results too, that specific book. You should have put it in caps to indicate it is a title. I'm still not sure whether what happened to one post somehow proves whether or not "many people on HN are interested in" even that book, let alone the topic in general, but I am impressed by your confidence in your research methods.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#217

Post by mdoms »

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…

I'm NZ born and bred. I oppose our current lockdown situation and think it should have been lifted a long time ago. I think we got extremely lucky in our first wave and I think our government handling of the delta wave (and the lack of preparation in advance of it) is shameful. I am extremely critical of our government and very disturbed by the media's handling of it. I could not be more depressed by the sorry state of our opposition.

All of that to to say that describing NZ as a "reverse" open-air prison is so far beyond absurd I don't even know what to say. For one thing, Kiwis are free to leave NZ - perhaps it's Australia you're thinking of, which really did lock its citizens at home under punishment of 5 years in prison or a $66,000 fine[0]?

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_during_the_COVID-19_pan...

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#218

Post by throwawayboise »

GuB-42 wrote: post #208
newsbinator wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A fair coin. It is important because if you flip a coin 20 times and get 20 tails, there is probably something fishy with that coin and you probably should bet tails. If it is 100 out of 100 (or even 95 out of 100), there is effectively zero chance that the coin is fair. This can be modeled using Bayesian statistics. You start by assuming with a reasonably high probability that the coin is fair, then you revise your…

But the lesson isn't how to tell whether a coin is fair. The lesson is that in independent events such as coin flips, lottery draws, roulette or slot machine spins, rolls of the dice, etc., past outcomes don't predict future outcomes. If people understood this they would not spend hours at gaming tables and machines, because the odds (in favor of the house) are exactly the same for your 100th pull of the lever as they were for the first one, and the more you play the more likely it is that you lose, not win.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#220

Post by BrandoElFollito »

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 don't remember who said that (pretty sure that it was R Monroe in xkcd, as usual): correlation is not causation but the data is heavily winking at you (it was more funny in his words)
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