I think the cautionary tale comes from applying what we've learned from GMO in other sectors. Try this on for size: So your parents were told there was a 50% chance of producing offspring with a debilitating genetic disease. A Chinese based company offers a service where they perform an in vitro fertilization with genetic modification to reduce the chance the disease manifests to 0%. Your parents go ahead with the procedure and, voila, you're born to a disease free, healthy life; that is until you decide to procreate. At that point, the Chinese company steps in and says they own the genetic modification you would be passing on to your potential children. They demand a licensing fee, or threaten legal action.
Better yet: you're born to a disease free, healthy life, except that you need an injection of the company's patented compound once a day to survive.
Because GMO means evil, and GMO with humans is so evil that it might as well be Republican.
The objective described in the paper is well clear of ethics problems, because it's correction of a genetic abnormality, thalassemia.The first step, of course, is to learn to do this reliably. Then we'll be getting into enhancements. Tetrachromat vision? Enhanced memory? An immune system that can nuke anything?
when we get to the point of making changes in the human germline that are not just bug fixes in our firmware, we need to develop an ethical standard. And no, beiong afraid to explore the potential of the tech is not an ethical standard. How about: thou shalt not restrict the choices available to your offspring? For example, you could go for better memory, but not for lower intelligence.
It's a solution in search of a problem, though. If we can have the ability to genetically test to find the defect to cure it, we have the ability to test to inform the couple they should not be procreating. It's not like we're short of babies who need parents. If people don't want to be deprived of the blessing of seeing (the rest of) their particular set of genes carried on, they need to grow up; their genes are still resident in the population, and it's not worth the investment in time, effort, and money, let alone human embryos if that's important, to see if we can cross mommy with daddy and fix the thalassemia and see how that turns out, while uncounted perfectly healthy kids starve or languish in third world baby warehouses. The kids are probably better off not being their parents' "second chance to not make the same mistakes" anyway.
Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?
They were "horribly" able to cure B-thalassemia in 51.8% of the embryos.
We should "learn not to do this type of thing" from the post-testing not having a 100% success rate.
You know, instead of just not implanting the other 48.2% of embryos that were not successfully modified to not have the disease.
Not that they planned on implanting them anyway.
PS: I know in vitro clinic which would be screaming the "Happy, happy, Joy, joy!" song at the top of their lungs for a 51.8% pre-screening success rate on just not implanting embryos that carried the gene for Huntington's or Downs Syndrome, let alone *fixing* the damn thing.
not 48%: "The team injected 86 embryos and then waited 48 hours, enough time for the CRISPR/Cas9 system and the molecules that replace the missing DNA to act — and for the embryos to grow to about eight cells each. Of the 71 embryos that survived, 54 were genetically tested. This revealed that just 28 were successfully spliced, and that only a fraction of those contained the replacement genetic material. “If you want to do it in normal embryos, you need to be close to 100%,” Huang says. “That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.” So, only an undefined "fraction" of 28 out of 54, at best.
Nevertheless, your larger point holds.
Stupid people tend to have a lot more kids than smart people.
Fortunately that doesn't appear to be true. Sure, quite a few geniuses with a 150 IQ have trouble finding a mate, but there are just as many people (by definition) with an IQ of only 50. How likely are they to find someone and have kids?
Closer to the average, higher intelligence definitely makes people more attractive, not less. Girls don't want to marry someone who's dumb if they can get a smarter partner. I remember reading a study demonstrating a positive correlation between IQ and procreation, but it was a few years ago and I can't find the link. Anyway, it seems to make sense, notwithstanding trailer trash with dozens of kids and business women running out of time to start a family. Apparently we're still doing OK on average.
There are plenty of other areas, especially health-related, where our genome is slowly degenerating for lack of selection since we can fix so many defects with medical procedures (or simply don't need high quality senses anymore to survive), but fortunately the evolution of intelligence appears to still be going in the right direction.
For all those other qualities that are degenerating, we'll need some kind of genetic manipulation or selection at some point, but we'll be OK for quite a while before it really becomes a problem, and by then we will have gotten over our ethical objections (apparently the Chinese are well on the way).
By definition, if evolution isn't selecting against XYZ any more because we are saving those people from dying, then XYZ isn't a serious defect any more.
the automotive related intertubes discuss a new method of auto thefts which hypothetically involves using some sort of RF amp or repeater or such to amplify the signal from your key fob in your house to make your car think you're standing waiting to get in, for those cars which are nice enough to automatically unlock when you approach without buttons to push.
See, and that is the problem right there. Its so easy to see the problems, and you are right. The prison and military industrial complexes, as well as several others, are a huge problem but.... and this is a Ron Jeremy hairy ass but.... there is no way anything remotely as simple as "Term Limits" is going to fix shit.
You think the big industries can't find bodies to fill seats on a more regular basis?
The bigger problem, really, is fundamentally flawed structure that isn't scaling well, especially since entire industries have grown up around exploiting its weaknesses for profit in one way or another. It is a a deep house made of many many cards.
Take the disasterous war on drugs and particularly pot. When it was made illegal, it wasn't actually even considered a serious drug of abuse. Hell, I have read the congressional records on the first marijuana law which included this exchange "Mr Speaker, what is marijuana?" "I don't know, some narcotic".
Some of the most vocal proponents of the law were people who worked for the FBN, the precursor of the DEA... the people who had just seen prohibition die and were scared for their jobs. It was essentially a coalition of federal workers worried about their jobs and a few industrialists who stood to profit. The AMA even sent a doctor to the Senate hearings to advise against passing the bill!
Now, some 80 years later, how many people have been arrested? How many shot? How many houses and cars repossessed? There are more marijuana smokers than the next 3 major illicit drugs...combined. How many police officers, how many probation officers, how many prison gaurds, drug testing lab technitions.....all have jobs because we arrest and charge adults for smoking a plant.
Its disgusting but, as high as the ideals of this system are, it is incapable of dealing with them. Its incapable of stopping the spending of billions upon billions on military projects we don't need for adversaries we don't have.....because these are diseases eat at the very fabric of the system.
Shit, the DEA openly claims "Parallel Construction" is a legal tactic for "protecting sources" when the reality is, the source they are protecting is the mass surveillance that the people likely wouldn't approve of if they knew...and it works because the system has exhausted its defenses against uncontrolled growth. The loopholes are found....
If a the Police can guide a constructed evidence trail to the courts, then, there is no such thing as a poisonous tree anymore. Their entire answer to mass surveillance is now "anything we don't tell you about is ok".
This system is nearly entirely ownend by tumors of its own creation. Its not any one of these, its all of these. Its the Prison system often enlarged to create jobs and win votes or for private profit, which results in gaurds unions who then lobby for strict laws.... its the military contractors who farm out work to multiple districts to make every project political suicide to kill.... its just so many special interests with so many perverse alignments that its like the patient has lived so long he is more tumor than man.
Bingo. You'd have better results with term limits on American voters than on representatives. The voters are perfectly able to boot the representatives out if they wanted to. Obviously, they don't.
There has been amazing commentary on why this is. The largest, and most unified group of republican voters are evangelical Christians and within that group, the existance of Israel is seem as a prerequisite to the second coming.
Being all for Israel is a less controversial stance than many others that still panders to a key bloc.
Nothing but an attack on the intelligence of the poster based on....a single fucking word.
It's not so much that it's a word, but a phrase which subtly changes the meaning. My hunch is it's a phrase they've heard and not read. As always the devil is in the details. Have you heard someone slip up with their units (TB and KB)? An innocent slip or not it makes them sound foolish in a technical discussion, likewise using a phrase improperly taints the points they're making and brings into question and how informed they are. Perception is reality. Without people pointing this crap out, how will it get better? The use of irregardless is on the rise ffs.
Online posts are such absurd crapshoots of appeals to authority and opinion as fact, even people (myself included) who seem to know what they're talking about spout so much profound misinformed nonsense and outright fantasy it's hilarious to take anything read online seriously. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, nobody.
That's why the smart and safe way is to make up your own idioms. "The two major parties both require their members to smurf the gasket at all times". The supercilious reader then assumes he/she is unfamiliar with something other people all know, and will of course pretend that he/she understands it too.
R or D doesn't matter if they agree to allow this type of bullshit they are assholes.
Seriously how much are we spending on the witch hunt for terrorists?
Can they show results of thwarted attacks to merit such spending? If not the assholes should be removed from office.
On a side note I'd be interested to find out if there are any ties between these people and those that have the contracts to provide hardware for this project.
Vaccines are great. I won't dispute that. My children are vaccinated, but I have followed a different schedule than the one recommended and I reserve the right to refuse specific vaccines (Because who really needs Varicella vaccination if you were already infected as a child? It's also hardly ever fatal for that matter).
It is up to parents to decide what is right for their own child with regard to medical decisions. Medical decisions are difficult and not always cut and dry. I refuse to give up the right of anyone deciding what is appropriate for their child in this regard, because medical decisions live with you forever.
So if a parent doesn't want to have their child vaccinated, that's a-okay with me. My children are vaccinated, so I've done everything that I personally can do to protect them. I can't protect them from everything and I don't expect other parents to protect my children either. I can only do what I can, and the rest is up to chance in the end.
Giving up freedom because of fear is not the answer. Mandating the "correct" decision is often wrong. Better instead to push education and appropriate information rather than to force others to make the decision you want them to.
varicella can be fatal in infants, and people with weak immune systems who can't be vaccinated. Plus, varicella infection leaves you at risk for shingles, which is not pleasant. Plus, if you've already had varicella, then you're not going to be even mildly affected by the vaccine.
You may find your black and white ideological extremism comforting, but in the real world, where real people live, collisions of liberties means there are no absolutes. In general terms, your freedom of action ends at the tip of my nose, so your liberties are not absolute.
Children have the same fundamental liberties as their parents, but are not deemed to have the emotional or cognitive maturity to exercise those liberties responsibly. The child's guardians is thus given considerable legal and moral authority over the child, but that authority is not absolute, because to make it absolute would essentially render the child's liberties null and void. And thus the courts can force a child to have life-saving procedure like a blood transfusion despite the protestation's of the child's guardian.
Your freedom to have a nose ends at the point where it interferes with my freedom to swing my fist wildly about.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
Or, they may realize that the government service they are receiving is beneficial, and that might start them wondering about whether the Tea Party is confused.
maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but why would you test to "ensure that"? the randomization guarantees it (assuming that it is done correctly, of course); poking around after-the-fact can only undo the blind, which is why good experiments take some measures to make it difficult.
and why is it "guaranteed to happen 5% of the time"? is that independent of sample size and distribution of the factor? quite remarkable indeed!
you sound quite confused about certain things.
The whole point of the concern of the editors of the journal, as described in the article, is what the p-value actually represents: which is, the chances that the test in question, using two randomized samples from the same population, will demonstrate a difference of the size in question. I.e., 5% of the time a randomized population will show a difference in any test with a Gaussian distribution of p=.05.
You do the randomization, you test all the independent variables you are controlling for/adjusting for/interested in/worried about; if any are significantly different at.05 or whatever you preferentially redo the randomization; if not you have to rely on your statistical adjustment to take care of it, but you're safer if you can redo the randomization.
If you're not doing this, you should tell people in your publications, because it's something they should know. Apparently, you believe that if you flip a coin twice, it's guaranteed to produce one head and one tail. This is not a good assumption to go into statistical analysis with.
P-values certainly are probabilities. You just argued they aren't probabilities, but they are probabilities of this other thing. You contradicted yourself. I was specifically vague when I called it 'something' because it changes with the type of test and there are many to choose from and I didn't want to write a whole book. That book has already been written by smarter people than I.
Right, Basically, but vaguely, the experimenter compares two sets of numbers, and calculates the average difference between numbers in the same group (hopefully, getting the same results in each group) and compares that to the difference in the average between the two groups, and wants to know; given this difference between the two groups and this difference between those in the same group, what is the probability that in reality, if there were no errors or noise, there would be a real actual difference between groups (and what is the reasonable range that the actual difference might be). So far, pretty clear, right?
but what the p-value tells you is the opposite way around; i.e., if there really is no difference between the two groups except for errors and noise, then the probability that I'd see the difference between groups and the difference between members of the same group that I'm seeing in my experiment, is.05 (or whatever your p-value is). And, hard as it is to believe given so many of the words being the same, you can't get the answer you want from the answer the p-value gives you.
p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.
p-values are like the PHP of statistics.
> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."
There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.
What you want to know when analyzing your data is, that if you see this result XXXX when you do the experiment, what percentage of the time would there really not be anything happening and you are just seeing a fluke. However, what the p-value.05 says is that if there really isn't anything happening, then we'd only see this fluky result less than 5% of the time; which when you think about it of course is pretty much useless information, because by definition you don't know whether there is anything happening or not, so less than 5% of an unknown number is useless. That's what these editors are concerned about. The two numbers, what you want to know and what the p-value tells you, aren't simply related in any fashion; other than both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which is also not useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
I mean, both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which IS also useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.
p-values are like the PHP of statistics.
> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."
There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.
What you want to know when analyzing your data is, that if you see this result XXXX when you do the experiment, what percentage of the time would there really not be anything happening and you are just seeing a fluke. However, what the p-value.05 says is that if there really isn't anything happening, then we'd only see this fluky result less than 5% of the time; which when you think about it of course is pretty much useless information, because by definition you don't know whether there is anything happening or not, so less than 5% of an unknown number is useless. That's what these editors are concerned about. The two numbers, what you want to know and what the p-value tells you, aren't simply related in any fashion; other than both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which is also not useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
Well, the whole debate circles around the fact that there is a missing piece of information, no matter how you try to shove the wrinkle in the carpet around, it has to show up somewhere. In this case, they're saying that the p-value is reflecting the probability that the null hypothesis is correct when the results obtained say it is incorrect, and what is missing is the probability that the test hypothesis is correct. The basic forest comprising all these trees is Type I errors and Type II errors, i.e. incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis (false positive), vs incorrectly not rejecting the null hypothesis (false negative). For any given experiment and result, whatever the noise and error are, the Type I and Type II errors interact; if you want to avoid false positives when analyzing that dataset, you specify a small p-value, but you increase the chances of false negatives, and vice versa. Mostly, we've decided to minimize false positives, so we go with p=.05. If you were able to precisely measure the rate of one of these types of errors you could precisely calculate the other; but you can't, so you have to just push your uncertainty over to where you figure it will do the least damage. You can put a floor on the Type II error rate estimate by specifying the power of the experiment; i.e., the more tests you make, or the higher the number in your sample, the smaller the effect you can find. For instance, if you're trying to prove a drug is not harmful, intuitively a test of 5 people isn't going to be anywhere near as conclusive as a test of 1,000 people; statistically/mathematically/calculatedly, that's because in that case, the null hypothesis is that the drug is not harmful, and the p-value is testing for Type I errors; but what you're really looking for is Type II errors, i.e. you want to ensure that there isn't a nonzero rate of harm that is too low to show up in your little sample size. You can't get that the way you get p-value, though; the best you can do is calculate the statistical power of the experiment, i.e. that with this sample size, if the rate of harmful complications was greater than 1 in 100 or whatever, we would see it with 95% probability. So, when you include this calculation in with your stats, you get the best set of numbers you can; that the p-value of.05 says that if we got a result that the drug is harmful, then the chance of it not being harmful is less than 5%, which of course is pretty much useless information; but the power result also tells you that if the drug is harmful at a rate of XXXX%, we would have a 95% chance of seeing it, which is more useful, but not as precise numerically. Amazingly, that wasn't even considered by the FDA for years when evaluating drugs for safety, so manufacturers were free to test drugs on tiny populations and say with all honesty that they didn't see any problems. It wasn't until later that it occurred to somebody that they really needed a properly powered trial to be safe.
My immediate thought would be that hard math in this field doesn't tow the groupthink
Why should the math be towing the groupthink? Can't the groupthink move on its own?
Or did you mean "toe the groupthink" as in "toe the line". No, that expression isn't about pulling barges, it's about standing in the right place in a formation....
Or tow the lion. That's a dangerous and difficult task.
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I think the cautionary tale comes from applying what we've learned from GMO in other sectors. Try this on for size: So your parents were told there was a 50% chance of producing offspring with a debilitating genetic disease. A Chinese based company offers a service where they perform an in vitro fertilization with genetic modification to reduce the chance the disease manifests to 0%. Your parents go ahead with the procedure and, voila, you're born to a disease free, healthy life; that is until you decide to procreate. At that point, the Chinese company steps in and says they own the genetic modification you would be passing on to your potential children. They demand a licensing fee, or threaten legal action.
Better yet: you're born to a disease free, healthy life, except that you need an injection of the company's patented compound once a day to survive.
"Why is this a cautionary tale?"
Because GMO means evil, and GMO with humans is so evil that it might as well be Republican.
The objective described in the paper is well clear of ethics problems, because it's correction of a genetic abnormality, thalassemia.The first step, of course, is to learn to do this reliably. Then we'll be getting into enhancements. Tetrachromat vision? Enhanced memory? An immune system that can nuke anything?
when we get to the point of making changes in the human germline that are not just bug fixes in our firmware, we need to develop an ethical standard. And no, beiong afraid to explore the potential of the tech is not an ethical standard. How about: thou shalt not restrict the choices available to your offspring? For example, you could go for better memory, but not for lower intelligence.
It's a solution in search of a problem, though. If we can have the ability to genetically test to find the defect to cure it, we have the ability to test to inform the couple they should not be procreating. It's not like we're short of babies who need parents. If people don't want to be deprived of the blessing of seeing (the rest of) their particular set of genes carried on, they need to grow up; their genes are still resident in the population, and it's not worth the investment in time, effort, and money, let alone human embryos if that's important, to see if we can cross mommy with daddy and fix the thalassemia and see how that turns out, while uncounted perfectly healthy kids starve or languish in third world baby warehouses. The kids are probably better off not being their parents' "second chance to not make the same mistakes" anyway.
Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?
They were "horribly" able to cure B-thalassemia in 51.8% of the embryos.
We should "learn not to do this type of thing" from the post-testing not having a 100% success rate.
You know, instead of just not implanting the other 48.2% of embryos that were not successfully modified to not have the disease.
Not that they planned on implanting them anyway.
PS: I know in vitro clinic which would be screaming the "Happy, happy, Joy, joy!" song at the top of their lungs for a 51.8% pre-screening success rate on just not implanting embryos that carried the gene for Huntington's or Downs Syndrome, let alone *fixing* the damn thing.
not 48%: "The team injected 86 embryos and then waited 48 hours, enough time for the CRISPR/Cas9 system and the molecules that replace the missing DNA to act — and for the embryos to grow to about eight cells each. Of the 71 embryos that survived, 54 were genetically tested. This revealed that just 28 were successfully spliced, and that only a fraction of those contained the replacement genetic material. “If you want to do it in normal embryos, you need to be close to 100%,” Huang says. “That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.” So, only an undefined "fraction" of 28 out of 54, at best.
Nevertheless, your larger point holds.
Stupid people tend to have a lot more kids than smart people.
Fortunately that doesn't appear to be true. Sure, quite a few geniuses with a 150 IQ have trouble finding a mate, but there are just as many people (by definition) with an IQ of only 50. How likely are they to find someone and have kids?
Closer to the average, higher intelligence definitely makes people more attractive, not less. Girls don't want to marry someone who's dumb if they can get a smarter partner. I remember reading a study demonstrating a positive correlation between IQ and procreation, but it was a few years ago and I can't find the link. Anyway, it seems to make sense, notwithstanding trailer trash with dozens of kids and business women running out of time to start a family. Apparently we're still doing OK on average.
There are plenty of other areas, especially health-related, where our genome is slowly degenerating for lack of selection since we can fix so many defects with medical procedures (or simply don't need high quality senses anymore to survive), but fortunately the evolution of intelligence appears to still be going in the right direction.
For all those other qualities that are degenerating, we'll need some kind of genetic manipulation or selection at some point, but we'll be OK for quite a while before it really becomes a problem, and by then we will have gotten over our ethical objections (apparently the Chinese are well on the way).
By definition, if evolution isn't selecting against XYZ any more because we are saving those people from dying, then XYZ isn't a serious defect any more.
Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?
Main caution here is that most of the time the modification didn't take.
the automotive related intertubes discuss a new method of auto thefts which hypothetically involves using some sort of RF amp or repeater or such to amplify the signal from your key fob in your house to make your car think you're standing waiting to get in, for those cars which are nice enough to automatically unlock when you approach without buttons to push.
See, and that is the problem right there. Its so easy to see the problems, and you are right. The prison and military industrial complexes, as well as several others, are a huge problem but.... and this is a Ron Jeremy hairy ass but.... there is no way anything remotely as simple as "Term Limits" is going to fix shit.
You think the big industries can't find bodies to fill seats on a more regular basis?
The bigger problem, really, is fundamentally flawed structure that isn't scaling well, especially since entire industries have grown up around exploiting its weaknesses for profit in one way or another. It is a a deep house made of many many cards.
Take the disasterous war on drugs and particularly pot. When it was made illegal, it wasn't actually even considered a serious drug of abuse. Hell, I have read the congressional records on the first marijuana law which included this exchange "Mr Speaker, what is marijuana?" "I don't know, some narcotic".
Some of the most vocal proponents of the law were people who worked for the FBN, the precursor of the DEA... the people who had just seen prohibition die and were scared for their jobs. It was essentially a coalition of federal workers worried about their jobs and a few industrialists who stood to profit. The AMA even sent a doctor to the Senate hearings to advise against passing the bill!
Now, some 80 years later, how many people have been arrested? How many shot? How many houses and cars repossessed? There are more marijuana smokers than the next 3 major illicit drugs...combined. How many police officers, how many probation officers, how many prison gaurds, drug testing lab technitions.....all have jobs because we arrest and charge adults for smoking a plant.
Its disgusting but, as high as the ideals of this system are, it is incapable of dealing with them. Its incapable of stopping the spending of billions upon billions on military projects we don't need for adversaries we don't have.....because these are diseases eat at the very fabric of the system.
Shit, the DEA openly claims "Parallel Construction" is a legal tactic for "protecting sources" when the reality is, the source they are protecting is the mass surveillance that the people likely wouldn't approve of if they knew...and it works because the system has exhausted its defenses against uncontrolled growth. The loopholes are found....
If a the Police can guide a constructed evidence trail to the courts, then, there is no such thing as a poisonous tree anymore. Their entire answer to mass surveillance is now "anything we don't tell you about is ok".
This system is nearly entirely ownend by tumors of its own creation. Its not any one of these, its all of these. Its the Prison system often enlarged to create jobs and win votes or for private profit, which results in gaurds unions who then lobby for strict laws.... its the military contractors who farm out work to multiple districts to make every project political suicide to kill.... its just so many special interests with so many perverse alignments that its like the patient has lived so long he is more tumor than man.
Bingo. You'd have better results with term limits on American voters than on representatives. The voters are perfectly able to boot the representatives out if they wanted to. Obviously, they don't.
There has been amazing commentary on why this is. The largest, and most unified group of republican voters are evangelical Christians and within that group, the existance of Israel is seem as a prerequisite to the second coming.
Being all for Israel is a less controversial stance than many others that still panders to a key bloc.
And yet, to coin a phrase, everybody want the second coming but nobody want Armageddon. http://www.deathandtaxesmag.co...
Nothing but an attack on the intelligence of the poster based on....a single fucking word.
It's not so much that it's a word, but a phrase which subtly changes the meaning. My hunch is it's a phrase they've heard and not read. As always the devil is in the details. Have you heard someone slip up with their units (TB and KB)? An innocent slip or not it makes them sound foolish in a technical discussion, likewise using a phrase improperly taints the points they're making and brings into question and how informed they are. Perception is reality. Without people pointing this crap out, how will it get better? The use of irregardless is on the rise ffs. Online posts are such absurd crapshoots of appeals to authority and opinion as fact, even people (myself included) who seem to know what they're talking about spout so much profound misinformed nonsense and outright fantasy it's hilarious to take anything read online seriously. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, nobody.
That's why the smart and safe way is to make up your own idioms. "The two major parties both require their members to smurf the gasket at all times". The supercilious reader then assumes he/she is unfamiliar with something other people all know, and will of course pretend that he/she understands it too.
Just a reminder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.... So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.... Good English means toe does actually work better than tow. So toe the line when it comes to English especially when using idioms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I..., otherwise the 'm' becomes a 't'.
tow that lion, lift that bear!
R or D doesn't matter if they agree to allow this type of bullshit they are assholes. Seriously how much are we spending on the witch hunt for terrorists? Can they show results of thwarted attacks to merit such spending? If not the assholes should be removed from office. On a side note I'd be interested to find out if there are any ties between these people and those that have the contracts to provide hardware for this project.
What? In Our America?
http://www.wired.com/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/...
http://heavy.com/news/2014/01/...
Who is Bill and why is he requiring me to get vaccinated? It's not Clinton, is it?
Vaccines are great. I won't dispute that. My children are vaccinated, but I have followed a different schedule than the one recommended and I reserve the right to refuse specific vaccines (Because who really needs Varicella vaccination if you were already infected as a child? It's also hardly ever fatal for that matter).
It is up to parents to decide what is right for their own child with regard to medical decisions. Medical decisions are difficult and not always cut and dry. I refuse to give up the right of anyone deciding what is appropriate for their child in this regard, because medical decisions live with you forever.
So if a parent doesn't want to have their child vaccinated, that's a-okay with me. My children are vaccinated, so I've done everything that I personally can do to protect them. I can't protect them from everything and I don't expect other parents to protect my children either. I can only do what I can, and the rest is up to chance in the end.
Giving up freedom because of fear is not the answer. Mandating the "correct" decision is often wrong. Better instead to push education and appropriate information rather than to force others to make the decision you want them to.
varicella can be fatal in infants, and people with weak immune systems who can't be vaccinated. Plus, varicella infection leaves you at risk for shingles, which is not pleasant. Plus, if you've already had varicella, then you're not going to be even mildly affected by the vaccine.
You may find your black and white ideological extremism comforting, but in the real world, where real people live, collisions of liberties means there are no absolutes. In general terms, your freedom of action ends at the tip of my nose, so your liberties are not absolute.
Children have the same fundamental liberties as their parents, but are not deemed to have the emotional or cognitive maturity to exercise those liberties responsibly. The child's guardians is thus given considerable legal and moral authority over the child, but that authority is not absolute, because to make it absolute would essentially render the child's liberties null and void. And thus the courts can force a child to have life-saving procedure like a blood transfusion despite the protestation's of the child's guardian.
Your freedom to have a nose ends at the point where it interferes with my freedom to swing my fist wildly about.
Liberty is absolute or it isn't liberty. When a state can define what is liberty, you end up with tyranny. Governance is NOT absolute. Liberty is.
Yes, I am a libertarian.
Liberty must include the liberty to define what liberty is.
Uh oh.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
Or, they may realize that the government service they are receiving is beneficial, and that might start them wondering about whether the Tea Party is confused.
You might want to read about what the FDA says about the mercury concentration in vaccines. I suspect kids may get more mercury in their fish sticks (fish fingers) than in their vaccines.
Major source of mercury in kids these days is emissions from coal burning power plants. But that's OK.
if you were home schooled, you wouldn't know. otherwise, you ought to remember.
my coporation' religious beliefs don't let me pay for employees' vaccinations
maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but why would you test to "ensure that"? the randomization guarantees it (assuming that it is done correctly, of course); poking around after-the-fact can only undo the blind, which is why good experiments take some measures to make it difficult.
and why is it "guaranteed to happen 5% of the time"? is that independent of sample size and distribution of the factor? quite remarkable indeed!
you sound quite confused about certain things.
The whole point of the concern of the editors of the journal, as described in the article, is what the p-value actually represents: which is, the chances that the test in question, using two randomized samples from the same population, will demonstrate a difference of the size in question. I.e., 5% of the time a randomized population will show a difference in any test with a Gaussian distribution of p=.05. You do the randomization, you test all the independent variables you are controlling for/adjusting for/interested in/worried about; if any are significantly different at .05 or whatever you preferentially redo the randomization; if not you have to rely on your statistical adjustment to take care of it, but you're safer if you can redo the randomization.
If you're not doing this, you should tell people in your publications, because it's something they should know. Apparently, you believe that if you flip a coin twice, it's guaranteed to produce one head and one tail. This is not a good assumption to go into statistical analysis with.
P-values certainly are probabilities. You just argued they aren't probabilities, but they are probabilities of this other thing. You contradicted yourself. I was specifically vague when I called it 'something' because it changes with the type of test and there are many to choose from and I didn't want to write a whole book. That book has already been written by smarter people than I.
Right, .05 (or whatever your p-value is). And, hard as it is to believe given so many of the words being the same, you can't get the answer you want from the answer the p-value gives you.
Basically, but vaguely, the experimenter compares two sets of numbers, and calculates the average difference between numbers in the same group (hopefully, getting the same results in each group) and compares that to the difference in the average between the two groups, and wants to know; given this difference between the two groups and this difference between those in the same group, what is the probability that in reality, if there were no errors or noise, there would be a real actual difference between groups (and what is the reasonable range that the actual difference might be). So far, pretty clear, right?
but what the p-value tells you is the opposite way around; i.e., if there really is no difference between the two groups except for errors and noise, then the probability that I'd see the difference between groups and the difference between members of the same group that I'm seeing in my experiment, is
p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.
p-values are like the PHP of statistics.
> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."
There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.
What you want to know when analyzing your data is, that if you see this result XXXX when you do the experiment, what percentage of the time would there really not be anything happening and you are just seeing a fluke. However, what the p-value .05 says is that if there really isn't anything happening, then we'd only see this fluky result less than 5% of the time; which when you think about it of course is pretty much useless information, because by definition you don't know whether there is anything happening or not, so less than 5% of an unknown number is useless. That's what these editors are concerned about. The two numbers, what you want to know and what the p-value tells you, aren't simply related in any fashion; other than both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which is also not useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
I mean, both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which IS also useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.
p-values are like the PHP of statistics.
> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."
There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.
What you want to know when analyzing your data is, that if you see this result XXXX when you do the experiment, what percentage of the time would there really not be anything happening and you are just seeing a fluke. However, what the p-value .05 says is that if there really isn't anything happening, then we'd only see this fluky result less than 5% of the time; which when you think about it of course is pretty much useless information, because by definition you don't know whether there is anything happening or not, so less than 5% of an unknown number is useless. That's what these editors are concerned about. The two numbers, what you want to know and what the p-value tells you, aren't simply related in any fashion; other than both are increased by high error rates and/or noise, which is also not useless information, plus it's something you probably figured out intuitively.
Well, the whole debate circles around the fact that there is a missing piece of information, no matter how you try to shove the wrinkle in the carpet around, it has to show up somewhere. In this case, they're saying that the p-value is reflecting the probability that the null hypothesis is correct when the results obtained say it is incorrect, and what is missing is the probability that the test hypothesis is correct. .05 says that if we got a result that the drug is harmful, then the chance of it not being harmful is less than 5%, which of course is pretty much useless information; but the power result also tells you that if the drug is harmful at a rate of XXXX%, we would have a 95% chance of seeing it, which is more useful, but not as precise numerically.
The basic forest comprising all these trees is Type I errors and Type II errors, i.e. incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis (false positive), vs incorrectly not rejecting the null hypothesis (false negative). For any given experiment and result, whatever the noise and error are, the Type I and Type II errors interact; if you want to avoid false positives when analyzing that dataset, you specify a small p-value, but you increase the chances of false negatives, and vice versa. Mostly, we've decided to minimize false positives, so we go with p=.05. If you were able to precisely measure the rate of one of these types of errors you could precisely calculate the other; but you can't, so you have to just push your uncertainty over to where you figure it will do the least damage.
You can put a floor on the Type II error rate estimate by specifying the power of the experiment; i.e., the more tests you make, or the higher the number in your sample, the smaller the effect you can find. For instance, if you're trying to prove a drug is not harmful, intuitively a test of 5 people isn't going to be anywhere near as conclusive as a test of 1,000 people; statistically/mathematically/calculatedly, that's because in that case, the null hypothesis is that the drug is not harmful, and the p-value is testing for Type I errors; but what you're really looking for is Type II errors, i.e. you want to ensure that there isn't a nonzero rate of harm that is too low to show up in your little sample size. You can't get that the way you get p-value, though; the best you can do is calculate the statistical power of the experiment, i.e. that with this sample size, if the rate of harmful complications was greater than 1 in 100 or whatever, we would see it with 95% probability. So, when you include this calculation in with your stats, you get the best set of numbers you can; that the p-value of
Amazingly, that wasn't even considered by the FDA for years when evaluating drugs for safety, so manufacturers were free to test drugs on tiny populations and say with all honesty that they didn't see any problems. It wasn't until later that it occurred to somebody that they really needed a properly powered trial to be safe.
Why should the math be towing the groupthink? Can't the groupthink move on its own?
Or did you mean "toe the groupthink" as in "toe the line". No, that expression isn't about pulling barges, it's about standing in the right place in a formation....
Or tow the lion. That's a dangerous and difficult task.