9 ms·
Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008)
- BlueScreenDeath 6y agoYou people are idiots.
- lliamander 6y agoLol, I've heard about this before. From what I can recall, the underlying correlation is that: a) there are more storks in rural areas b) people who live in rural areas tend to have more children.
- centimeter 6y agoI believe it was Nick Land who described cities as “IQ shredders”; they attract high intelligence people from rural areas and then immediately tank their birth rate.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- minikites 6y agoIt's a good thing intelligence isn't a heritable trait.
- exolymph 6y agoFor the curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20140918210933/http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140918210933/http://www.xenosy...
- earthboundkid 6y agoYes, this is why Asians and Whites are the dumbest races. They had traditions of religious celibacy, which while not always honored, caused lower birthrates among the intelligent, whereas Africa, the New World, and the Middle East did not. Joke explainer: That was sarcastic, but the point is anyone can make up a plausible just so story about anything by picking some factoids to support their prejudices.
- bonestormii_ 6y agoSo if you were being sarcastic about Asians and Whites being the dumbest races... are they the smartest? Seems a little racist. Please make use of the edit button.
- bigdollopenergy 6y agoThere's a guideline on this site to assume that the poster is acting in good faith and not to take the worst interpretation of what someone is saying. They almost certainly meant there is no difference rather than it being the true opposite.
- earthboundkid 6y agoYes, just to be explicit: there are no meaningful genetic differences in intelligence among human "races" (which is not a meaningful genetic group anyway).
- centimeter 6y agoYour joke doesn't really get to the point - do you think religious celibacy is as significant of a demographic factor as urbanization? Urbanization affects over half of the population.
- guipsp 6y agoIs this the same Nick Land famous for his racist views that kickstarted the "dark enlightenment"?
- ardy42 6y ago> Is this the same Nick Land famous for his racist views that kickstarted the "dark enlightenment"? Yep, looks like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701129 The neoreactionary perspective is just oozing from that post, too.
- centimeter 6y agoUh oh, that must make everything he says wrong!
- pjc50 6y agoWell, yes? It means he's primarily an ideologue telling just-so stories rather than someone acting in good faith.
- renewiltord 6y agoThey don't tank them enough to damage society, right? Most intelligent people still have kids.
- pjc50 6y agoFor much of human history cities had disease rates so high that they were below replacement rate even in the pre-contraception era. It remains the case that that's where the art and culture happens, because the synergistic benefits of bringing like minded people together make them far more effective at producing culture than isolated farmers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ThreeFx 6y agoA very very good example of correlation != causation.
- mistermann 6y agoIs there a formal notation for always or usually?
- renewiltord 6y agoYes, P(correlation ∩ causation) = 1 would be textually written as "It is almost certain that correlation and causation occur together". Or to bring you closer to the example, you could say P(causation | correlation) = 1 to say "It is almost certain that causation exists if correlation exists". You can alter the right-hand side, but then you have to stop saying 'almost certain' because everyone assumes that means a measure one set. So, for instance, you might believe that P(causation | correlation) = 0.8 across all human chosen distributions. You might well be right since adversarial distributions are so rarely chosen, i.e. there is a meta-effect where humans are choosing interesting queries in the first place.
- enan 6y agoThe causation does exist but in a different direction (see the GP's post about storks and chimneys).
- elcomet 6y agoGP's post was about storks on houses. This article studies the number of storks in a country overall. So it's not really related. I'd say total storks in a country and total births in a country are more related to the size of the country.
- gowld 6y agoHeadline is clickbait. There's no evidence that storks deliver babies vs storks being born alongside babies, or babies creating storks, or that storks impregnate mothers.
- lisper 6y agoYeah, that is actually kinda the whole point.
- whymauri 6y agoThese downvotes are Poe's Law at work. I think this is actually a meta joke, folks.
- bawolff 6y agoWhat, we're not allowed to downvote jokes that aren't particularly funny?
- BlueScreenDeath 6y agoBut he was trying to not be funny. To be funny.
- bendbro 6y agoBut how do we know that the root comment had not already succumbed to Poe's Law?
- jovial_cavalier 6y agoEveryone who is downvoting this comment has incurable autism.
- arkitaip 6y agoLet's not attack people with autism because HN is full of the humorless.
- 6y ago
- anonu 6y agoI saw the compuserve email address at the top - flashback. I wonder if the stats have changed since 2000, when the paper was written.
- wscott 6y agoThis matching one of the original claims in the "How to Lie with Statistics" book (1954). Storks like roosting on chimney pots and larger houses have more chimneys and more children.
- mikorym 6y agoOn the other side of the thought process, if you are interested in ways to completely ignore p-values, multivariate stats is a good candidate, and is rather pedagogically well suited, too. For example, if you have a friend who hates chi-squared tests, instead teach them correspondence analysis. A year later you can tell them they already know how to do a chi-squared test. To be fair, this latter comment depends a bit on how the library is implemented, and possibly it only does correspondence analysis while not giving you direct access to a way to generate p-values. Some libraries will have a function that you can call that runs simulations and then provides the p-values. Many of these statistical techniques are an obligation only if you have to sample from a space and you have to somehow determine whether the sample is representative. If you presuppose that your sample is representative, then you move into a parallel world of statistics. An example would be a thermometer. If you sample it at 10:00 00 and again at 10:00 01, certainly you would expect both to be the same? If it's not the same or a close value I would rather say that the thermometer is broken, not that your within group variation for the minute 10:00 is high...
- celias 6y agoNumberphile has a Do Storks Deliver Babies? video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-d1ApBTFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-d1ApBTFw There's also the amusing Spurious Correlations site with several examples of convincing looking correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- swiley 6y agoOh wow! That's filmed by the same guy that does periodic videos!
- pindab0ter 6y agoBrady Haran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran). I Like to believe he's somewhat of a low-key internet celebrity with a slew of YouTube channels and a successful podcast. All-round top bloke, too.
- mojomark 6y agoI don't understand why everyone calls the correlation between the number of storks and childbirths per country as "spurious". That's incorrect. There is absolutely a correlation, but it is the statement that the fabricated cause of that correlation as presented (i.e. storms deliver babies) is true that is spurious. The truth underpinning the correlation (i.e. increased country size tends to yield increased populations of flora/fauna of all varieties) requires additional data to reveal - especially, in this case, if your a person who has never heard of a "stork" or what one is. The p-value tells researchers that there's something interesting going on between data sets and further exploration is likely warranted to reveal the true underlying relationship. It's not a proof of a fabricated conclusion. "The golden way to test a causal relation is an appropriately designed experiment, where only the suspected "cause" is varied and the "effect" is observed." 1. https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_correlation_doesnt_imply_causation_then_if_I_find_a_statistically_significant_correlation_how_can_I_prove_the_causality https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_correlation_doesnt_impl...
- holtkam2 6y agoWait but can anyone confirm if storks actually deliver babies?
- withinboredom 6y agoThe doctor who delivered my son was Dr. Stork.
- laksdjfkasljdf 6y agopreviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirates_and_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirat...
- nabla9 6y agoAnother great study: "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials" BMJ 2003; 327 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459 --- Abstract Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge. Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials. Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists. Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall. Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15. Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention. Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
- Someone 6y agoThat’s a BMJ Christmas paper. Those can be funny. https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-types/christmas-issue https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...: “We publish a special two-week issue of The BMJ over Christmas and New Year. We are pleased to consider all kinds of articles, including reports of original research, for this issue. The soul of the Christmas issue is originality. We don’t want to publish anything that resembles anything we’ve published before. While we welcome light-hearted fare and satire, we do not publish spoofs, hoaxes, or fabricated studies.” Examples of BMJ ‘Christmas’ articles at https://sciencemadeeasy.kinja.com/top-10-bmj-christmas-papers-1670745827 https://sciencemadeeasy.kinja.com/top-10-bmj-christmas-paper..., https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-best-of-the-british-medical-journals-goofy-christmas-papers-180948177/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-best-of-the-br...
- HPsquared 6y agoHmm, now what on earth could be the confounding variable...
- cozzyd 6y agoHere's the "real" link https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9639.00013 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9639.00013 and here is a downloadable version by the author: http://robertmatthews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/RM-storks-paper.pdf http://robertmatthews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/RM-stor... Does researchgate provide any service other than showing up first in searches for papers then obfuscating the real source of papers and making me prove I'm human every time by clicking on pictures of motorcycles or cars or buses everytime I accidentally click on one of their links?
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoIt is funny (and upsetting) how this is on the HackerNews frontpage, and yet this [0] is also sitting on the frontpage with currently double the upvotes. The study in question observes some correlation and then nonchalantly declares a causation (see title). Not too sure what to make of this... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24675256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24675256
- jweir 6y agoGell-Mann amnesia at work
- AshamedCaptain 6y agoJust wait for the next "miraculous covid cure found" article next week. Vitamin D, fasting, .. What's next?