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Visualizing False Positives In Broad Screening
AlejoHausner writes "To find one terrorist in 3000 people, using a screen that works 90% of the time, you'll end up detaining 300 people, one of whom might be your target. A BBC article asks for an effective way to communicate this clearly. 'Screening for HIV with 99.9% accuracy? Switch it around. Think also about screening the millions of non-HIV people and being wrong about one person in every 1,000.' The problem is important in any area where a less-than-perfect screen is used to detect a rare event in a population. As a recent NYTimes story notes, widespread screening for cancers (except for maybe colon cancer) does more harm than good. How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?"
It can't. People are stupid; Americans doubly so. We live in a country where half the people believe that a talking snake catered the wedding between a naked man and a naked woman made out of his rib, which enraged the upstairs landlord so much he evicted them. They also believe some guy sitting on a sky chair gives a shit how a high school football game ends. They believe that the Honolulu paper printed a fake birth announcement in 1961 so that 48 years later a socialist elected to take away their guns. And those that don't? They think that Kennedy was shot by aliens hired by the Illuminati and that a president blew up some office buildings in 2001 to steal the gold in the basement. Idiots all.
You want these idiots to understand how statistics works? Then you need to write a Java program that demonstrates it so simply that a retarded chihuahua could understand it. Oh, and it has to be colored red, white, and blue, cause this is 'Merica!. And it has to have tits in it somewhere.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Actually, there's a pretty quick solution to both overweight and ignorance.
However, it has bad effects on public health.
And you spend a lot of bullets.
Why don't they speak out against the bigoted extremist representatives then?
The same reason huge swathes of the U.S. population didn't speak out against the bigotted extremist representing them between 2000 and 2008.