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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?

368 points by Anon84 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago
i think it's reasonable to infer that the ghosts are angry and are killing moviegoers
mackrevinack 5y ago
global average temperature vs number of pirates: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/...
- moffkalast 5y ago
  My god. It's linear!
- ffhhj 5y ago
  Sid Meier's Civilization predicted it!
- bhouston 5y ago
  I believe they are excluding the pirates off the coat of Africa: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48581197 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48581197
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  Better one is the number of pool drowning vs. Nicolas Cage movie releases - https://i.imgur.com/q54sO25.png https://i.imgur.com/q54sO25.png
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lr4444lr 5y ago
Great, but are we just gonna forget all of this when reading "data-backed" social justice activist claims?
rob_c 5y ago
I ... walks away from conversation...
SnowflakeOnIce 5y ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb put out a video explanation of how Simpson's Paradox applies here, which is more direct and less tongue-in-cheek compared to the post: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVRfBhy5vGI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVRfBhy5vGI
henvic 5y ago
Fooled by randomness.
kazinator 5y ago
Don't let this, ahem, gatekeep you from watching an excellent movie.
tux1968 5y ago
There's no way on earth they can actually know the movie-viewing history of those who recently died. So the data must simply be fabricated. It undermines the point they're trying to make. They should have used a real example.
- gregjw 5y ago
  Its so so clearly a joke. Come on man.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    From the about page: > Being keenly aware of political biases on both sides, my goal is to try to remain as apolitical as possible and try to filter out what I perceive as political biases and describe what I consider to be key insights gained from a particular report or resource It’s hard to tell what’s a joke anymore.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spaceisballer 5y ago
    Or an advertisement for the new movie.
  - tux1968 5y ago
    What's the joke? It seems to me they're trying to make a point about the study that appears lower on the page, the one claiming that vaccinated people are dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated.
    - Hnrobert42 5y ago
      Older people die more often than younger people. More older people are vaccinated than younger people. The study at the bottom shows that vaccinated people are dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated people. The joke is on the person who concludes that the increase in death rate is because of the vaccine and not the age difference.
makeitdouble 5y ago
Another Spurious Correlations [0]. The message will always bear repeating. [0] https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- lordnacho 5y ago
  No, most of those are "actually spurious" in the sense of the two time series having nothing to do with each other. A lot of them are pretty short series as well, so it's easy for them to be correlated. What we are looking at is Simpson's Paradox, where the true causal relationship is obscured by information that isn't obvious from the plot. Now before you correlation != causation, there is actually a causation here that you can access with statistics.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    Simpson’s paradox is when a trend or correlation is observable in each of the sub-populations, but vanishes when the data is aggregated. For example, a drug that has a strong effect on men and women when analyzed separately, but shows little effect at the population level. This example is not Simpson’s paradox, it is simply the misuse of statistics. Statistics, being mechanical transformations of data, only have semantics within a causal model. Simply picking variables randomly and then assuming causality when the statistics behave that way is inverting the process of knowledge formation. EDIT: Thanks for the corrections—the real data that this fictional example is based on does show Simpson’s paradox, as the dependent variable (death rates) appears to show a positive correlation with vaccination status when aggregating the population, but a negative correlation for every age group individually.
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      Isn't that what's happening here? There's a guy who claims vaccination has the opposite effect to what people normally claim, that they actually cause people to die. And it seems to be because people from age 10 to 59 have been aggregated. The sub-populations, for instance ages 10-19, 20-29, etc would not be showing that vaccinated individuals are dying more often. It's only by aggregating them you get the wrong conclusion.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
The introduction to the article needs more context. I don’t understand why it exists, who cares about it and who would believe that.
- EliRivers 5y ago
  Often, you can discover such things by reading the article.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    Often, but not in this case, hence my comment.
    - 300bps 5y ago
      Did you read the whole article? At the end it reveals the entire point - that failing to take into consideration the age of study participants in things like Covid death rates render false conclusions from studies.
      - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
        So a guy posted something on Facebook and got less likes than a teenage girl usually gets on Instagram. And so this another guy decides to preach to the choir because of that? Might as well write an article about microchips in the vaccines and 5G. I guess it also will hit the top on HN.
        emodendroket 5y ago
        Berenson is not just some nobody. He is a prominent media personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson
      - fortran77 5y ago
        > Did you read the whole article? This is Hacker News! Of course not.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nanna 5y ago
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.
- tejohnso 5y ago
  Makes me cringe a little bit when global warming presentations start out with a co2 vs global temperature chart. Especially if that forms the entire basis of the analytic part of the presentation. Because I know someone (most) is just thinking "correlation != causation" and dismissing the entire thing.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    Yes; interesting that they never bring up the chart showing we’re at the peak of a natural 125,000 year temperature cycle.
    - everybodyknows 5y ago
      Source? The long temperature graphs I've seen look quite irregular, rather than cyclical.
      - morsch 5y ago
        Here's the smoking gun graph he's hosting: http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG This is what he's talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles Here's a graph similar to his, hosted on German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovi%C4%87-Zyklen#/media/Datei:Milankovic-Zyklen_2017_(cropped).jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovi%C4%87-Zyklen#/media/... Nobody brings it up, because scientists don't believe the observed changes in temperatures are due to Milankovitch cycles, since global warming is happening on the order of decades and not millenia. Here's NASA's take: https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovi...
Tade0 5y ago
This is a reference to this post: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60 https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult... I had a discussion about it at work because my teammate is vocal about the alleged harm that vaccines cause and is no stranger to confirmation bias. Shame that they lumped so many people into the same group, because if you look closer at the data for e.g. England: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaType=nation&areaName=England https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaTyp... There's a strong correlation between age and vaccine intake, because older people were given priority. The difference in intake among the age groups is as high as 50 percentage points.
- everybodyknows 5y ago
  > ... lumped so many people into the same group ... This is the flaw in the UK aggregation, as cited from Table 4 by the blogger. 10-59 lumps nearly-invulnerable children in the same bucket with 50-something obese diabetic smokers. Table 8, and the last line of Table 1, show properly-weighted vaccination effects. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
xoa 5y ago
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 one of the most valuable classes I took in my entire time K-12 was AP Probability & Stats as a sophomore, but that was an entirely optional class with restricted openings anyway (a single teacher in a school of 1200+) which the vast majority never took even where it was offered. Yet interpreting the deluge of data in the modern world requires some level of being able to reason about things probabilisticly and have a sense of what actually goes into a measure of "significance", null hypothesis and the danger of result-driven analysis finding links that don't exist and/or cannot possibly be causitive, how sampling a population works and what the error bars look like at different sizes, random vs biased distributions, the underlying distributions, confounding factors etc. I really wish in general kids got started on some light probability thinking as early as possible, in elementary school even, without any real math (let alone calc and such) yet, but just some initial stuff to start to illustrate the mindset. Lots of very fun games and hands-on exercises with dice and so on use or could be made to use important aspects of probability and its misuse. At any rate, I'm certainly not an expert. But 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". ---- 0: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/...
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  > … 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.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    And our justice system is largely built off of what is reasonable, yet it's undefined.
api 5y ago
This sort of thing is why "do your own research" is simply not plausible advice for 99% of people, even highly educated intelligent people with time on their hands. Most of the high level problems in our civilization require years of study to even be capable of formulating a valid opinion. The thing people have to do is to instead focus on evaluating people and deciding who probably knows who they are talking about. This is the same thing successful leaders and managers have to do when they hire. Unfortunately there is no foolproof method. Going with the consensus in a field is going to yield better than average results, but it's not a perfect rule by any means.
- sinuhe69 5y ago
  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 all the time.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "But unfortunately people make the same mistake again all the time." Exactly what the previous comment said.
  - mattcwilson 5y ago
    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 getting crafted every day; we owe it to ourselves, each other, and the future humans to educate them on defense against the dark arts.
    - tjpnz 5y ago
he0001 5y ago
According to the author the Ghostbuster post is a joke. Author states so in a more recent article https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-impact-of-vaccines-on-deaths-part3-all-cause-1st-dose-w-in-21-days https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...
guilhas 5y ago
This article is like the factcheckers fact checking a similar irrelevant thing to avoid having to investigate the real issue
- phonypc 5y ago
  What chart for October and November? Your link only goes to 24th September and says it's the latest release. Edit: this comment and others now appear to be nonsensical because OP essentially replaced their comment with an entirely different one.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  Sorry I am confused about which removed chart I’m supposed to see here. If you are talking about “3. Weekly mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) by vaccination status“ then it’s in no way clear to me that your conclusion is correct. First, the fully vaccinated line is the lowest there. I can definitely see a correlation between people getting their first shot, getting adventurous because they feel safe, and then catching COVID that they aren’t prepared for because they aren’t fully vaccinated. Also this chart isn’t separated by populations. That is the mortality rate isn’t “per 100,000 fully/partially/un-vaccinated”. It’s per 100,000 total. Which means that as the total number of unvaccinated people declines so does that particular mortality rate. If everyone was vaccinated and people still died from COVID then of course only the vaccinated would die, right?
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I'm seeing a slight upward trend in the "1 dose" line (indeed just crossing the "unvaccinated" line in a latest month), but the "2 doses" line is much lower than both, and doesn't seem to be changing much.
  - guilhas 5y ago
    You're totally right, misread the chart. Edited all out unless I find the weekly report Still why would people with 1 dose be dying more than unvaccinated?
- afavour 5y ago
colanderman 5y ago
For anyone as confused as me: the graph colors swap halfway through the article.
OJFord 5y ago
Tl;dr someone fell for Simpson's paradox [0] and wrote a (probably 'viral') post on how Covid-19 vaccines are killing us; this is a (slightly confusing at first without context, I thought - especially because it starts of joking about correlation/causation that seems a bit different to me) rebuttal. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Correlation_between_variables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Correlatio...
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Berenson is one of the most prominent deniers, previously famous for his claims about marijuana being far more dangerous than commonly believed.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I'm curious how you're (as someone who it sounds like doesn't believe him/fall for it) aware of them? I believe you, assume you're correct, he's (nor anyone else like that) just not 'on my radar' at all. I just assumed prominence/virality of at least this one post due to the existence of one (the submission) refuting it.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      He is a former New York Times reporter, makes frequent media appearances, and was very active on Twitter before being suspended, so I was familiar with him before anybody had heard of COVID-19.
- cldellow 5y ago
  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 tweets, but unfortunately his account is now suspended. Twitter really needs a way to access tweets from banned accounts in a way that removes their virality but preserves them for posterity.
draw_down 5y ago
[dead]
mrlonglong 5y ago
Man's not asking the right questions!
_p4lt 5y ago
Wow that seemed like a lot of effort to make a point. Often twitter oversimplifies things, but that could legitimately have been a tweet of the offending graph and a few words about how older/sick people are more likely to have been vaccinated, and also more likely to die because they're old/sick. I do like the original Ghostbusters movie, but I'm not sure that really added to the effect for me.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  Changing minds with humor is better than making points in the echo chamber.
  - jacksonkmarley 5y ago
    I guess you found it funnier than me, but making points seemed like a huge part of that article.
    - mattcwilson 5y ago
      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.
      - jacksonkmarley 5y ago
        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.
lr1970 5y ago
Ya, right. And 99% of everyone in UK who died from COVID (of all genders and age groups) were eating bread while alive. Eating bread is a great predictor of COVID mortality! </end_of_sarcasm>
fghab 5y ago
Creatively using statistics happens on both sides. Example: "Case statistics show us that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated!" But due to the 3g rule (access to events or buildings is granted to the vaccinated, recovered or people with a PCR test less than 24h ago) in countries like Germany, guess which group is tested most: The unvaccinated. Other groups do not need tests!
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Many of those statements are about the relative numbers of infected people in hospitals. There could be value in reducing spread due to vaccinated people (depending on how much of it there is, as you say, we don't have good surveillance of it), but there's lots of value in reducing hospitalizations, and that's what many of those statements are about.
- TehCorwiz 5y ago
  Actually, the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" is also supported by their over-representation in hospital admissions and deaths. https://lawrence-robinson.medium.com/vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-hospital-admissions-death-evidence-based-information-74327fb599e5 https://lawrence-robinson.medium.com/vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-hosp... "A study done by the CDC in New York accounted for the following — “A total of 1,271 new COVID-19 hospitalizations (0.17 per 100,000 person-days) occurred among fully vaccinated adults, compared with 7,308 (2.03 per 100,000 person-days) among unvaccinated adults”."
melling 5y ago
Lots of Spurious Correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
CheckBlanket 5y ago
Yes, smugly mocking people's very valid concerns will surely win them over. Don't study the figures, just do as we say!
- geofft 5y ago
  Did you study the figures in the blog post? On what basis do you believe the concerns are "very valid"? I do agree with you that mockery is unlikely to win hearts and minds, but the whole problem here is that the concerns are not valid and the people with concerns are not studying the figures and the people they're arguing against are not saying "just do as we say," and yet the concerns persist.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    That and once you start making television appearances and publishing books, your claims are fair game.
- hnarn 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - ukie 5y ago
    [dead]
- ertian 5y ago
  It's not (just) smug mockery. It's taking a post that might have made a big impression on people, and giving a deliberately silly variant to make it clear how the logic is incorrect. Just pointing out the faulty logic would've made for a boring post that many people wouldn't have bothered reading, and would risk being dismissed as hand-waving or rationalizing. Picking something eye-catching and obviously ridiculous keeps people's attention, and also can't be dismissed as mere rhetoric since the conclusion does actually hold.
- adrr 5y ago
  These same people are willing to take monoclonal antibodies which are human antibodies harvested from vaccinated genetically modified rodents. It’s the same spike protein antibody just produced in rodents instead of their bodies.
JuliusBranson 5y ago
I'm not sure why this sort of thing impresses people, it's obvious the 1984 ghostbuster group skews old.
- assbuttbuttass 5y ago
  That's the point? It's satire
  - JuliusBranson 5y ago
    People seem to take it as some sort of impressive critique of statistics and the scientific method. Similar to "there is a Replication Crisis, vaguely speaking, so your bigot facts don't matter." No, the replication crisis is mostly a function of low sample sizes and misinterpretation, if a paper has a decent number of people and isn't being interpreted by an activist (like, ie, the social researchers themselves), it's valid. Same thing here, this is only impressive to people who don't know how to interpret statistics.
    - fullshark 5y ago
      How can you think this is a critique of statistics? People are liking it because it's a clever brand of internet snark involving knowledge of statistics. You can say it's shallow and just for people who want to flatter themselves with how knowledgable they are, but it's hardly a critique of the field of statistics, just a critique of bad statistics.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      The OP article I read did not not seem to be a critique of statistics or the scientific method?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
StringyBob 5y ago
As just discussed on the wonderful BBC radio show more or less - available as a podcast and also published online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b6j20n https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b6j20n
Borrible 5y ago
Not that many people on HN seem to be interested in spurious correlations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=spurious%20cor&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  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.
  - Borrible 5y ago
    Yeah, you're right. We should make a test or something... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      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.
      - Borrible 5y ago
        The irony of being taken seriously does not escape me.You can perhaps correlate my amazement.
jkhdigital 5y ago
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.
- josho 5y ago
  Care to explain what you mean?
  - hedora 5y ago
    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.
    - jeremysalwen 5y ago
      > The first graph specifically controls for *age*, vaccination rates, and size of population. > Age 10-59 Hmmmm....
neiman 5y ago
As Benjamin Disraeli said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
- oxfeed65261 5y ago
  Per Wikipedia [0]: “The phrase [lies, damned lies, and statistics] was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who vaguely attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often attributed to Twain himself.” I had mistakenly believed that Twain originated this remark until I looked it up just now. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...
1970-01-01 5y ago
The link to his dataset is missing. Show me the raw numbers, I want to make my own conclusions.
User23 5y ago
Why is the ghostbusters graph obviously just a photoshop relabeling of the covid vaccine graph? > I have checked the underlying dataset myself and the graph plotted above [the photoshopped one] is correct. People under 60 who watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are twice as likely to die as people who watched the 2021 Ghostbusters movie. The overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal. The poster of this article is observably a liar. Perhaps there is some kind of point to be made here, but I'll wait until someone honest attempts to present it.
- brokensegue 5y ago
  The first part is a joke... Keep reading and you'll get it
rsj_hn 5y ago
> 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 denying basic things like brain evolution, whereas Murray's Bell Curve has held up pretty well in the sciences (being hated, of course on the humanities side), and his latest Human Diversity, is a good overview of the state of the art, with 50% of the book being footnotes. There has been a lot discovered since Gould's Mismeasure was published, and all of it bad news for Gould and good news for Murray. 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. There are always a stream of people like Gould who try to defend this position by mocking/caricature the opposing side, but that is not considered good science.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > 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.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > 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.
m3kw9 5y ago
But I can tell you why the bowl of cereal that is put in front of me always correlates to it disappearing.
microdrum 5y ago
He is referring to a statistical quantization mistake that the target, COVID lockdown critic Alex Berenson, did not make.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- czzr 5y ago
  But he did make that mistake? Can you explain what you mean?
EarlKing 5y ago
Betteridge's Law of headlines says.... NO. There. Saved you a click.
- jmull 5y ago
  Whoosh! Hey, what was that?
jjk166 5y ago
Missed title opportunity: "Do Ghostbusters Cause Ghosts?"
lbj 5y ago
Excellent analogy. I wonder if someone would be kind enough to shed some light on this graph: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/ 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 diehard argument from those who are negative against the covid vaccine. What could a reasonable explanation be? PS: Someone filed for more insight with our national institute of health (SSI) and they replied that following the first shots in December 2020, about 4.500 people died within 30 days. This is generally understood to be because the group we vaccinated first was already above the mean expected age, so their time was already up so to speak, ie. death could have been caused by anything, including old age. I think it only caught the attention of the mainstream, because in all of 2020 we had a total of 1.250 "deaths with covid" whereof about 1.000 of these had more than 2 co-morbidities.
- t0mas88 5y ago
  There is a huge spike in active cases right before and after Dec 11th. More cases = more deaths.
  - lbj 5y ago
    That's true, but what you can't tell from this graph was that in this period we went from 10.000 tests per day to almost 200.000, so I think that might account for must of the uptick in active cases in this period. During some of our biggest spikes the infection% has hovered around 2 - 3%. Present day we have about 430k active cases, which is almost 10% of the population, but the % is still 2.3%.
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      Testing more will uncover more benign cases, that's true, but it is also possible that people are testing more due to having more symptoms. Vaccination has continued in Denmark so if vaccines were killing people we'd expect to see that rocketing as Denmark has one of the highest vaccination rates. I think the causality is: More illness -> More people get tested More illness -> More people get vaccinated More illness -> More people die
motohagiography 5y ago
Imo, this is the level of discourse we need on vaccine efficacy, risk, and data. It's funny and demonstrates some mastery of the concept of the sample bias behind it. When 80% of the population is vaccinated, the base rate of dying of anything at all carries over with them as people change their own status from one category to the next, creating a false causality link between the base rate of dying anyway and their status change to vaccinated. I'd say now do covid and its variants, but regardless, well done. We need smarter and more compelling people making these cases for important things instead of feeding lines to actors and poli-sci bureaucrats on television. The hardest part of the pandemic I think will have been establishments everywhere realizing that people thought they were too dumb to be believed. One of my favorite Holzer truisms is, "A lack of charisma can be fatal," and I when I look at how this has played out, it's because the people announcing information and policies couldn't be taken seriously by 30%+ of the population even when they were telling the truth - which, unfortunately, was less than the whole time as well.
kriro 5y ago
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.
jkonline 5y ago
<soapbox> > 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." </soapbox> [0^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22movie-caused+mortality%22 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22movie-caused+mortality%22 [1^]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=movie-caused+mortality https://duckduckgo.com/?q=movie-caused+mortality
- k2enemy 5y ago
  Might want to re-read the article. I think this one flew way over your head. Unless your comment is satire, in which case your comment flew over my head.
- jkonline 5y ago
  This morning, I heard about the OP's article on the podcast "More or Less." Hats off to OP, and shame on me for getting caught in the trollnet. :D . . BTW, More or Less is a great data science / stats podcast! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
sumosudo 5y ago
All the learned studying the numbers, trying to figure out what number constitutes a genocide, while doing nothing about the genocide that is happening. This poison is just that. Poison. The immense numbers of injury and death being caused by the jab, and not by a fucking flu, is sad to watch. You don't need to see numbers, or debate on correlation of ticker tallies, when one is seeing it. Good luck to those who think this is not happening, you will be brutally awaken very soon, because its worse than you think.
jmull 5y ago
> Maybe someone should explain this to Alex Berenson before he writes another SubStack post, or the thousands of people forwarding this around social media and alternative social media platforms. Of course Alex Berenson understands this perfectly well. He's among the utterly despicable group pushing various forms of covid denial for the benefit boosting their standing in their tribe. Whether it's for $-for-clicks or political capital or just to make themselves feel good, it's pathetic and terrible. Speaking directly to the people doing this on HN (including in this very thread): you're going to have to go to the end of your life knowing that when things were bad, you made them worse, and got people killed who didn't have to die like that. Do you really want the biggest contribution of your life on the world to be bad one, and for petty, pathetic reasons? Really, think about it. Do you want your life to have been about fooling people about the risks of covid, covid vaccines, and the general value of science? You don't have to live a sad, pathetic, less-than-meaningless life. If things aren't good, go out there and contribute rather than just tear things down.
candeira 5y ago
My explanation of the base rate fallacy is that most car crashes are caused by people who hold a valid driver's permit. The number of crashes caused by unlicensed drivers is negligible. Therefore, we should stop issuing driving licenses. Most people I explain this to recognise the fallacy, even if they're not trained in statistics. A huge problem with vaccine denialism is that it stems from motivated thinking. People aren't being persuaded by bullshit arguments; rather, they already agree with the conclusions, and look to these spurious correlations as emotional support.
_jstreet 5y ago
This feels like one of those browser addons/scripts that replaces words,e.g "being vaccinated" -> "watched the 1984 Ghostbusters" "unvaccinated" -> "2021 Ghostbusters movie"

368 points by Anon84 5y ago

i think it's reasonable to infer that the ghosts are angry and are killing moviegoers

global average temperature vs number of pirates: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/...

moffkalast 5y ago
My god. It's linear!
ffhhj 5y ago
Sid Meier's Civilization predicted it!
bhouston 5y ago
I believe they are excluding the pirates off the coat of Africa: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48581197 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48581197
huhtenberg 5y ago
Better one is the number of pool drowning vs. Nicolas Cage movie releases - https://i.imgur.com/q54sO25.png https://i.imgur.com/q54sO25.png

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lr4444lr 5y ago

Great, but are we just gonna forget all of this when reading "data-backed" social justice activist claims?

rob_c 5y ago

I ... walks away from conversation...

SnowflakeOnIce 5y ago

Nassim Nicholas Taleb put out a video explanation of how Simpson's Paradox applies here, which is more direct and less tongue-in-cheek compared to the post: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVRfBhy5vGI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVRfBhy5vGI

henvic 5y ago

Fooled by randomness.

kazinator 5y ago

Don't let this, ahem, gatekeep you from watching an excellent movie.

tux1968 5y ago

There's no way on earth they can actually know the movie-viewing history of those who recently died. So the data must simply be fabricated. It undermines the point they're trying to make. They should have used a real example.

gregjw 5y ago
Its so so clearly a joke. Come on man.
- paulcole 5y ago
  From the about page: > Being keenly aware of political biases on both sides, my goal is to try to remain as apolitical as possible and try to filter out what I perceive as political biases and describe what I consider to be key insights gained from a particular report or resource It’s hard to tell what’s a joke anymore.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spaceisballer 5y ago
  Or an advertisement for the new movie.
- tux1968 5y ago
  What's the joke? It seems to me they're trying to make a point about the study that appears lower on the page, the one claiming that vaccinated people are dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated.
  - Hnrobert42 5y ago
    Older people die more often than younger people. More older people are vaccinated than younger people. The study at the bottom shows that vaccinated people are dying at a higher rate than unvaccinated people. The joke is on the person who concludes that the increase in death rate is because of the vaccine and not the age difference.

makeitdouble 5y ago

Another Spurious Correlations [0]. The message will always bear repeating. [0] https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

lordnacho 5y ago
No, most of those are "actually spurious" in the sense of the two time series having nothing to do with each other. A lot of them are pretty short series as well, so it's easy for them to be correlated. What we are looking at is Simpson's Paradox, where the true causal relationship is obscured by information that isn't obvious from the plot. Now before you correlation != causation, there is actually a causation here that you can access with statistics.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Simpson’s paradox is when a trend or correlation is observable in each of the sub-populations, but vanishes when the data is aggregated. For example, a drug that has a strong effect on men and women when analyzed separately, but shows little effect at the population level. This example is not Simpson’s paradox, it is simply the misuse of statistics. Statistics, being mechanical transformations of data, only have semantics within a causal model. Simply picking variables randomly and then assuming causality when the statistics behave that way is inverting the process of knowledge formation. EDIT: Thanks for the corrections—the real data that this fictional example is based on does show Simpson’s paradox, as the dependent variable (death rates) appears to show a positive correlation with vaccination status when aggregating the population, but a negative correlation for every age group individually.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Isn't that what's happening here? There's a guy who claims vaccination has the opposite effect to what people normally claim, that they actually cause people to die. And it seems to be because people from age 10 to 59 have been aggregated. The sub-populations, for instance ages 10-19, 20-29, etc would not be showing that vaccinated individuals are dying more often. It's only by aggregating them you get the wrong conclusion.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

The introduction to the article needs more context. I don’t understand why it exists, who cares about it and who would believe that.

EliRivers 5y ago
Often, you can discover such things by reading the article.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  Often, but not in this case, hence my comment.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    Did you read the whole article? At the end it reveals the entire point - that failing to take into consideration the age of study participants in things like Covid death rates render false conclusions from studies.
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      So a guy posted something on Facebook and got less likes than a teenage girl usually gets on Instagram. And so this another guy decides to preach to the choir because of that? Might as well write an article about microchips in the vaccines and 5G. I guess it also will hit the top on HN.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        Berenson is not just some nobody. He is a prominent media personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson
    - fortran77 5y ago
      > Did you read the whole article? This is Hacker News! Of course not.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nanna 5y ago

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.

tejohnso 5y ago
Makes me cringe a little bit when global warming presentations start out with a co2 vs global temperature chart. Especially if that forms the entire basis of the analytic part of the presentation. Because I know someone (most) is just thinking "correlation != causation" and dismissing the entire thing.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  Yes; interesting that they never bring up the chart showing we’re at the peak of a natural 125,000 year temperature cycle.
  - everybodyknows 5y ago
    Source? The long temperature graphs I've seen look quite irregular, rather than cyclical.
    - morsch 5y ago
      Here's the smoking gun graph he's hosting: http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG This is what he's talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles Here's a graph similar to his, hosted on German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovi%C4%87-Zyklen#/media/Datei:Milankovic-Zyklen_2017_(cropped).jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovi%C4%87-Zyklen#/media/... Nobody brings it up, because scientists don't believe the observed changes in temperatures are due to Milankovitch cycles, since global warming is happening on the order of decades and not millenia. Here's NASA's take: https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovi...

Tade0 5y ago

This is a reference to this post: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60 https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult... I had a discussion about it at work because my teammate is vocal about the alleged harm that vaccines cause and is no stranger to confirmation bias. Shame that they lumped so many people into the same group, because if you look closer at the data for e.g. England: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaType=nation&areaName=England https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaTyp... There's a strong correlation between age and vaccine intake, because older people were given priority. The difference in intake among the age groups is as high as 50 percentage points.

everybodyknows 5y ago
> ... lumped so many people into the same group ... This is the flaw in the UK aggregation, as cited from Table 4 by the blogger. 10-59 lumps nearly-invulnerable children in the same bucket with 50-something obese diabetic smokers. Table 8, and the last line of Table 1, show properly-weighted vaccination effects. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

xoa 5y ago

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 one of the most valuable classes I took in my entire time K-12 was AP Probability & Stats as a sophomore, but that was an entirely optional class with restricted openings anyway (a single teacher in a school of 1200+) which the vast majority never took even where it was offered. Yet interpreting the deluge of data in the modern world requires some level of being able to reason about things probabilisticly and have a sense of what actually goes into a measure of "significance", null hypothesis and the danger of result-driven analysis finding links that don't exist and/or cannot possibly be causitive, how sampling a population works and what the error bars look like at different sizes, random vs biased distributions, the underlying distributions, confounding factors etc. I really wish in general kids got started on some light probability thinking as early as possible, in elementary school even, without any real math (let alone calc and such) yet, but just some initial stuff to start to illustrate the mindset. Lots of very fun games and hands-on exercises with dice and so on use or could be made to use important aspects of probability and its misuse. At any rate, I'm certainly not an expert. But 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". ---- 0: https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/hq-graphcopy2_800.jpg https://www.spaghettimonster.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/...

Hnrobert42 5y ago
> … 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.
- giantg2 5y ago
  And our justice system is largely built off of what is reasonable, yet it's undefined.

api 5y ago

This sort of thing is why "do your own research" is simply not plausible advice for 99% of people, even highly educated intelligent people with time on their hands. Most of the high level problems in our civilization require years of study to even be capable of formulating a valid opinion. The thing people have to do is to instead focus on evaluating people and deciding who probably knows who they are talking about. This is the same thing successful leaders and managers have to do when they hire. Unfortunately there is no foolproof method. Going with the consensus in a field is going to yield better than average results, but it's not a perfect rule by any means.

sinuhe69 5y ago
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 all the time.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "But unfortunately people make the same mistake again all the time." Exactly what the previous comment said.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  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 getting crafted every day; we owe it to ourselves, each other, and the future humans to educate them on defense against the dark arts.
  - tjpnz 5y ago

he0001 5y ago

According to the author the Ghostbuster post is a joke. Author states so in a more recent article https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-impact-of-vaccines-on-deaths-part3-all-cause-1st-dose-w-in-21-days https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...

guilhas 5y ago

This article is like the factcheckers fact checking a similar irrelevant thing to avoid having to investigate the real issue

phonypc 5y ago
What chart for October and November? Your link only goes to 24th September and says it's the latest release. Edit: this comment and others now appear to be nonsensical because OP essentially replaced their comment with an entirely different one.
IgorPartola 5y ago
Sorry I am confused about which removed chart I’m supposed to see here. If you are talking about “3. Weekly mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) by vaccination status“ then it’s in no way clear to me that your conclusion is correct. First, the fully vaccinated line is the lowest there. I can definitely see a correlation between people getting their first shot, getting adventurous because they feel safe, and then catching COVID that they aren’t prepared for because they aren’t fully vaccinated. Also this chart isn’t separated by populations. That is the mortality rate isn’t “per 100,000 fully/partially/un-vaccinated”. It’s per 100,000 total. Which means that as the total number of unvaccinated people declines so does that particular mortality rate. If everyone was vaccinated and people still died from COVID then of course only the vaccinated would die, right?
nicoburns 5y ago
I'm seeing a slight upward trend in the "1 dose" line (indeed just crossing the "unvaccinated" line in a latest month), but the "2 doses" line is much lower than both, and doesn't seem to be changing much.
- guilhas 5y ago
  You're totally right, misread the chart. Edited all out unless I find the weekly report Still why would people with 1 dose be dying more than unvaccinated?
afavour 5y ago

colanderman 5y ago

For anyone as confused as me: the graph colors swap halfway through the article.

OJFord 5y ago

Tl;dr someone fell for Simpson's paradox [0] and wrote a (probably 'viral') post on how Covid-19 vaccines are killing us; this is a (slightly confusing at first without context, I thought - especially because it starts of joking about correlation/causation that seems a bit different to me) rebuttal. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Correlation_between_variables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Correlatio...

emodendroket 5y ago
Berenson is one of the most prominent deniers, previously famous for his claims about marijuana being far more dangerous than commonly believed.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I'm curious how you're (as someone who it sounds like doesn't believe him/fall for it) aware of them? I believe you, assume you're correct, he's (nor anyone else like that) just not 'on my radar' at all. I just assumed prominence/virality of at least this one post due to the existence of one (the submission) refuting it.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    He is a former New York Times reporter, makes frequent media appearances, and was very active on Twitter before being suspended, so I was familiar with him before anybody had heard of COVID-19.
cldellow 5y ago
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 tweets, but unfortunately his account is now suspended. Twitter really needs a way to access tweets from banned accounts in a way that removes their virality but preserves them for posterity.

draw_down 5y ago

[dead]

mrlonglong 5y ago

Man's not asking the right questions!

_p4lt 5y ago

Wow that seemed like a lot of effort to make a point. Often twitter oversimplifies things, but that could legitimately have been a tweet of the offending graph and a few words about how older/sick people are more likely to have been vaccinated, and also more likely to die because they're old/sick. I do like the original Ghostbusters movie, but I'm not sure that really added to the effect for me.

mattcwilson 5y ago
Changing minds with humor is better than making points in the echo chamber.
- jacksonkmarley 5y ago
  I guess you found it funnier than me, but making points seemed like a huge part of that article.
  - mattcwilson 5y ago
    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.
    - jacksonkmarley 5y ago
      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.

lr1970 5y ago

Ya, right. And 99% of everyone in UK who died from COVID (of all genders and age groups) were eating bread while alive. Eating bread is a great predictor of COVID mortality! </end_of_sarcasm>

fghab 5y ago

Creatively using statistics happens on both sides. Example: "Case statistics show us that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated!" But due to the 3g rule (access to events or buildings is granted to the vaccinated, recovered or people with a PCR test less than 24h ago) in countries like Germany, guess which group is tested most: The unvaccinated. Other groups do not need tests!

maxerickson 5y ago
Many of those statements are about the relative numbers of infected people in hospitals. There could be value in reducing spread due to vaccinated people (depending on how much of it there is, as you say, we don't have good surveillance of it), but there's lots of value in reducing hospitalizations, and that's what many of those statements are about.
TehCorwiz 5y ago
Actually, the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" is also supported by their over-representation in hospital admissions and deaths. https://lawrence-robinson.medium.com/vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-hospital-admissions-death-evidence-based-information-74327fb599e5 https://lawrence-robinson.medium.com/vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-hosp... "A study done by the CDC in New York accounted for the following — “A total of 1,271 new COVID-19 hospitalizations (0.17 per 100,000 person-days) occurred among fully vaccinated adults, compared with 7,308 (2.03 per 100,000 person-days) among unvaccinated adults”."

melling 5y ago

Lots of Spurious Correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

CheckBlanket 5y ago

Yes, smugly mocking people's very valid concerns will surely win them over. Don't study the figures, just do as we say!

geofft 5y ago
Did you study the figures in the blog post? On what basis do you believe the concerns are "very valid"? I do agree with you that mockery is unlikely to win hearts and minds, but the whole problem here is that the concerns are not valid and the people with concerns are not studying the figures and the people they're arguing against are not saying "just do as we say," and yet the concerns persist.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  That and once you start making television appearances and publishing books, your claims are fair game.
hnarn 5y ago
[flagged]
- ukie 5y ago
  [dead]
ertian 5y ago
It's not (just) smug mockery. It's taking a post that might have made a big impression on people, and giving a deliberately silly variant to make it clear how the logic is incorrect. Just pointing out the faulty logic would've made for a boring post that many people wouldn't have bothered reading, and would risk being dismissed as hand-waving or rationalizing. Picking something eye-catching and obviously ridiculous keeps people's attention, and also can't be dismissed as mere rhetoric since the conclusion does actually hold.
adrr 5y ago
These same people are willing to take monoclonal antibodies which are human antibodies harvested from vaccinated genetically modified rodents. It’s the same spike protein antibody just produced in rodents instead of their bodies.

JuliusBranson 5y ago

I'm not sure why this sort of thing impresses people, it's obvious the 1984 ghostbuster group skews old.

assbuttbuttass 5y ago
That's the point? It's satire
- JuliusBranson 5y ago
  People seem to take it as some sort of impressive critique of statistics and the scientific method. Similar to "there is a Replication Crisis, vaguely speaking, so your bigot facts don't matter." No, the replication crisis is mostly a function of low sample sizes and misinterpretation, if a paper has a decent number of people and isn't being interpreted by an activist (like, ie, the social researchers themselves), it's valid. Same thing here, this is only impressive to people who don't know how to interpret statistics.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    How can you think this is a critique of statistics? People are liking it because it's a clever brand of internet snark involving knowledge of statistics. You can say it's shallow and just for people who want to flatter themselves with how knowledgable they are, but it's hardly a critique of the field of statistics, just a critique of bad statistics.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    The OP article I read did not not seem to be a critique of statistics or the scientific method?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

StringyBob 5y ago

As just discussed on the wonderful BBC radio show more or less - available as a podcast and also published online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b6j20n https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b6j20n

Borrible 5y ago

Not that many people on HN seem to be interested in spurious correlations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=spurious%20cor&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

jrochkind1 5y ago
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.
- Borrible 5y ago
  Yeah, you're right. We should make a test or something... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370245
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    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.
    - Borrible 5y ago
      The irony of being taken seriously does not escape me.You can perhaps correlate my amazement.

jkhdigital 5y ago

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.

josho 5y ago
Care to explain what you mean?
- hedora 5y ago
  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.
  - jeremysalwen 5y ago
    > The first graph specifically controls for *age*, vaccination rates, and size of population. > Age 10-59 Hmmmm....

neiman 5y ago

As Benjamin Disraeli said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

oxfeed65261 5y ago
Per Wikipedia [0]: “The phrase [lies, damned lies, and statistics] was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who vaguely attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often attributed to Twain himself.” I had mistakenly believed that Twain originated this remark until I looked it up just now. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...

1970-01-01 5y ago

The link to his dataset is missing. Show me the raw numbers, I want to make my own conclusions.

User23 5y ago

Why is the ghostbusters graph obviously just a photoshop relabeling of the covid vaccine graph? > I have checked the underlying dataset myself and the graph plotted above [the photoshopped one] is correct. People under 60 who watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are twice as likely to die as people who watched the 2021 Ghostbusters movie. The overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal. The poster of this article is observably a liar. Perhaps there is some kind of point to be made here, but I'll wait until someone honest attempts to present it.

brokensegue 5y ago
The first part is a joke... Keep reading and you'll get it

rsj_hn 5y ago

> 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 denying basic things like brain evolution, whereas Murray's Bell Curve has held up pretty well in the sciences (being hated, of course on the humanities side), and his latest Human Diversity, is a good overview of the state of the art, with 50% of the book being footnotes. There has been a lot discovered since Gould's Mismeasure was published, and all of it bad news for Gould and good news for Murray. 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. There are always a stream of people like Gould who try to defend this position by mocking/caricature the opposing side, but that is not considered good science.

jacquesm 5y ago
> 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.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > 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.

m3kw9 5y ago

But I can tell you why the bowl of cereal that is put in front of me always correlates to it disappearing.

microdrum 5y ago

He is referring to a statistical quantization mistake that the target, COVID lockdown critic Alex Berenson, did not make.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
czzr 5y ago
But he did make that mistake? Can you explain what you mean?

EarlKing 5y ago

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

jmull 5y ago
Whoosh! Hey, what was that?

jjk166 5y ago

Missed title opportunity: "Do Ghostbusters Cause Ghosts?"

lbj 5y ago

Excellent analogy. I wonder if someone would be kind enough to shed some light on this graph: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/ 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 diehard argument from those who are negative against the covid vaccine. What could a reasonable explanation be? PS: Someone filed for more insight with our national institute of health (SSI) and they replied that following the first shots in December 2020, about 4.500 people died within 30 days. This is generally understood to be because the group we vaccinated first was already above the mean expected age, so their time was already up so to speak, ie. death could have been caused by anything, including old age. I think it only caught the attention of the mainstream, because in all of 2020 we had a total of 1.250 "deaths with covid" whereof about 1.000 of these had more than 2 co-morbidities.

t0mas88 5y ago
There is a huge spike in active cases right before and after Dec 11th. More cases = more deaths.
- lbj 5y ago
  That's true, but what you can't tell from this graph was that in this period we went from 10.000 tests per day to almost 200.000, so I think that might account for must of the uptick in active cases in this period. During some of our biggest spikes the infection% has hovered around 2 - 3%. Present day we have about 430k active cases, which is almost 10% of the population, but the % is still 2.3%.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Testing more will uncover more benign cases, that's true, but it is also possible that people are testing more due to having more symptoms. Vaccination has continued in Denmark so if vaccines were killing people we'd expect to see that rocketing as Denmark has one of the highest vaccination rates. I think the causality is: More illness -> More people get tested More illness -> More people get vaccinated More illness -> More people die

motohagiography 5y ago

Imo, this is the level of discourse we need on vaccine efficacy, risk, and data. It's funny and demonstrates some mastery of the concept of the sample bias behind it. When 80% of the population is vaccinated, the base rate of dying of anything at all carries over with them as people change their own status from one category to the next, creating a false causality link between the base rate of dying anyway and their status change to vaccinated. I'd say now do covid and its variants, but regardless, well done. We need smarter and more compelling people making these cases for important things instead of feeding lines to actors and poli-sci bureaucrats on television. The hardest part of the pandemic I think will have been establishments everywhere realizing that people thought they were too dumb to be believed. One of my favorite Holzer truisms is, "A lack of charisma can be fatal," and I when I look at how this has played out, it's because the people announcing information and policies couldn't be taken seriously by 30%+ of the population even when they were telling the truth - which, unfortunately, was less than the whole time as well.

kriro 5y ago

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.

jkonline 5y ago

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

k2enemy 5y ago
Might want to re-read the article. I think this one flew way over your head. Unless your comment is satire, in which case your comment flew over my head.
jkonline 5y ago
This morning, I heard about the OP's article on the podcast "More or Less." Hats off to OP, and shame on me for getting caught in the trollnet. :D . . BTW, More or Less is a great data science / stats podcast! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

sumosudo 5y ago

All the learned studying the numbers, trying to figure out what number constitutes a genocide, while doing nothing about the genocide that is happening. This poison is just that. Poison. The immense numbers of injury and death being caused by the jab, and not by a fucking flu, is sad to watch. You don't need to see numbers, or debate on correlation of ticker tallies, when one is seeing it. Good luck to those who think this is not happening, you will be brutally awaken very soon, because its worse than you think.

jmull 5y ago

> Maybe someone should explain this to Alex Berenson before he writes another SubStack post, or the thousands of people forwarding this around social media and alternative social media platforms. Of course Alex Berenson understands this perfectly well. He's among the utterly despicable group pushing various forms of covid denial for the benefit boosting their standing in their tribe. Whether it's for $-for-clicks or political capital or just to make themselves feel good, it's pathetic and terrible. Speaking directly to the people doing this on HN (including in this very thread): you're going to have to go to the end of your life knowing that when things were bad, you made them worse, and got people killed who didn't have to die like that. Do you really want the biggest contribution of your life on the world to be bad one, and for petty, pathetic reasons? Really, think about it. Do you want your life to have been about fooling people about the risks of covid, covid vaccines, and the general value of science? You don't have to live a sad, pathetic, less-than-meaningless life. If things aren't good, go out there and contribute rather than just tear things down.

candeira 5y ago

My explanation of the base rate fallacy is that most car crashes are caused by people who hold a valid driver's permit. The number of crashes caused by unlicensed drivers is negligible. Therefore, we should stop issuing driving licenses. Most people I explain this to recognise the fallacy, even if they're not trained in statistics. A huge problem with vaccine denialism is that it stems from motivated thinking. People aren't being persuaded by bullshit arguments; rather, they already agree with the conclusions, and look to these spurious correlations as emotional support.

_jstreet 5y ago

This feels like one of those browser addons/scripts that replaces words,e.g "being vaccinated" -> "watched the 1984 Ghostbusters" "unvaccinated" -> "2021 Ghostbusters movie"