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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?

#221

Post by ajuc »

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…

> if things are correlated, it should at least make a scientist wonder why

There's billions of possible variables. There's N^2 possible pairs of variables. It's not feasible to look at every pair that is correlated.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#222

Post by Borrible »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #216
Borrible wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

The irony of being taken seriously does not escape me.You can perhaps correlate my amazement.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#223

Post by School-Cotton »

PeterSmit wrote: post #210
ohwellhere wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_?

Well, it can also be pure randomness

They did say “ruling out chance”.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#224

Post by pstuart »

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 think we teach math wrong -- it's taught like everybody is going to go the distance with it, whereas that's a small minority.

We should teach math literacy -- how to use math to understand the world we live in, e.g. some stats as you mentioned, basic finance (the glories of compound interest), sizing stuff, etc.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#225

Post by rsj_hn »

dang wrote: post #200
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 si…

OK, fair enough, Dang!

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#227

Post by geofft »

native_samples wrote: post #212
geofft wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

> the claim that lockdowns work (they don't and this was known before COVID times)

This is a bold claim and I'd be curious to see you back this up. By "lockdowns" - do you mean actual, genuine lockdowns / quarantines (mandatory stay-at-home orders, government-distributed emergency food packs and other essentials), or do you mean capacity restrictions etc. that get called "lockdowns" in the popular media?

Note that my straw-man proposal (which I'm not seriously endorsing) is not that it should be prosecutable to have been wrong. Plenty of startups try to build something, and it doesn't work; they don't get prosecuted like Holmes. Holmes is facing prosecution for fraud, for knowingly telling falsehoods. If your implication is that academic epidemiologists, COVID experts, and the entire field of nutrition are all fraudulent as opposed to merely just going through the usual course of science - which, to be clear, I see as mostly but not entirely impossible - then yes, I think we have a rather serious problem on our hands, which we need to figure out for the survival of humanity, and I'll repeat my comment above: I'm very interested in knowing what proposals you have for solving it.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#228

Post by cableshaft »

paganel wrote: post #194
cableshaft wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They've allowed people to leave and come back (not the entire pandemic probably, but most of it), it's just if they come back they have to stay in a quarantine hotel for two weeks, especially if they tested positive for Covid.

A quarantine hotel that a bunch of assholes were so fucking impatient that they literally climbed fences and dodged security to escape from just to grab beer or some shit and wasted millions of dollars as New Zealand tried to contact trace everyone they came in contact with and try to keep a spread on it further.

When all they had to do was chill in a hotel for two weeks and then they'd be free to do whatever.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/asia-pacific/570511...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/02/new-zealand-po...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/man-...

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-delta-outbreak-man-es...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/454613/covid-19-two-esca...

A couple of these might be the same person, I just did a quick google search, but I think I've seen at least a dozen of these stories out of New Zealand over the past year and a half.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#229

Post by adfacxvzxc »

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…

yep, once in a while, it will end being a once in a life discovery.

so, everything defying common sense should be reviewed, to find why and how exactly is this happening.

Re: Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

#230

Post by DarylZero »

throwawayboise wrote: post #218
GuB-42 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

It's not based on a false understanding of math. It's based on the feeling they get (of anticipation or whatever).

It's harder to cure a gambling addiction than just giving them math facts. They don't even accept the fact they're addicts. To accept it would feel bad so they don't have the bad feeling thoughts. This emotional stuff just doesn't yield to facts.

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