You really think infant mortality has nothing to do with the lifestyles and decisions of the parents? That's absurd.
Number of physicians per person is another irrelevant metric. You continue to ignore the question of what goods and services are provided for the money spent. You need to look at the amount and quality of visits, procedures, medications, equipment, etc received. But instead you'll try yet again to evade this question and change the topic back to universal coverage. Sorry, I have better ways to spend my time than this. Sayonara.
I found the report to which you refer, and they ranked countries' health care by the following metrics of "quality":
Fairness in financial contribution (determined by low cubed absolute deviation in health spending) Level of health in "disability-adjusted life years" Distribution of health (low cubed abs. dev.) Level of "responsiveness" Distribution of responsiveness (again, low cubed abs. dev) Health expenditure per capita
and three summary rankings which are based on the others.
With the exception of responsiveness- a metric into which they've shoved many aspects of quality, such as wait times, patient privacy, and patient autonomy- where the US ranked #1, none of these metrics tell us anything about the quality of health care. They don't tell us about the value of medical goods, services, and procedures received.
You cannot rank health care by citizens' health; different people and cultures make different choices with respect to lifestyle, diet, etc. Again, you have to look at the services
Forcing wait times, patient choices, etc to be roughly equal is not generally an improvement. In nationalized health care systems, the long queues for services are an integral part of the system, helping to reduce demand for "free" services enough that the supply can meet it, and consumer choice is equally restricted across the board. You expect such systems to have relatively equal but long wait times and relatively equal but poor patient autonomy. That's not a plus.
I've already explained above why low health expenditures per capita are not an indication of quality health care.
Low variance in health expenditures is actually a measure of restriction on people's freedoms, not of health care quality; people with different incomes will normally be willing to spend different amounts.
I think that by using a nonstandard measure of variation (cubed absolute difference rather than variance/standard deviation) they're fudging the statistics to overemphasize equality of outcomes.
I don't feel at all bad that US health care ranks poorly according to such an arbitrary and useless set of metrics.
Again, if you think people in the US are paying more for the same or inferior service, you have zero comprehension of the facts. Americans receive more health care services, goods, and procedures than the rest of the OECD, they wait less, and by most metrics they have higher quality of care.
That doesn't necessarily mean Americans are healthier; people choose different tradeoffs with regard to lifestyle, diet, etc.
The fact that people choose to consume more health care- and therefore spend more on health care- as their income rises has nothing to do with just giving away money to insurers and some nebulous and malignant profit-gouging "health care industry," and I think you're quite aware that's a red herring.
You act as though there is one level of health care everyone absolutely needs, and that everything beyond that is superfluous; that's absurd. The vast majority of people throughout history lived perfectly normal and productive lives without having regular doctor visits, without ever seeing a dentist, without ever visiting a physical therapist, etc etc. All non-emergency care is basically elective. But most people find that their quality of life and longevity are improved when they undergo elective treatment and therefore they are willing to spend more to receive more.
(Note that when talking about the costs of health care and the need for a socialized system, people often fall back on the caricature of the "industry," because if people think of individual providers they can understand that a doctor should charge the market rate for his or her services. If his or her skills are in high demand, charging a commensurate price is not "gouging," it's the only way to properly reward them for providing such value and the only reasonable way to allocate the scarce resource of their time and services.)
The amount of money or even the percentage of GDP being spent on health care is not a measure of how much the health care system is a burden to the economy. It's totally irrelevant. The economy is not burdened by people producing and consuming goods and services- that is the economy. The fact that people choose to spend their money that way does not mean that they'd be better off if a central planner forced them to spend less of their money on that.
Most health care spending is a luxury good, in that as people's income rises they will choose to spend a greater proportion of their income on health care (if they are permitted to do so). It's true that health care spending as a percent of GDP is high in the US and low in Somalia. Maybe you think it's a waste that people in the US choose to consume more health care goods and services than the British NHS would deem necessary. Well, I think it's a waste for people to spend money on beer hats and pet mausoleums, but that doesn't mean that I think government should regulate these markets or that the economy would be better off if it did.
The economy is burdened by higher taxes and/or higher debt, by restrictions on what medical goods and services can be bought or sold, and by all the associated deadweight losses.
If you don't think nationalized health care systems involve health care rationing and queues, you're fooling yourself. Wait times for hospital visits, specialist appointments, and non-emergency surgery are all at least twice as long on average in Canada and the UK as they are in the USA.
It is generally illegal for doctors to charge patients for goods, services, or procedures which fall under the scope of the British NHS or Canada's Medicare, so you can't receive those goods/services/procedures unless it's permitted by the national system's guidelines- for instance, you have to have a referral from your "gatekeeper" GP to visit a specialist, and if he/she doesn't deem it medically necessary you are pretty much SOL. That is rationing.
I wasn't equating any of these nations' overall economies to that of the USSR; I was pointing out that socialized health care is not very different from socializing any other aspect of the economy- like the market for food- and carries similar dangers.
I made no claim that our health costs are lower than those of nations with socialist health care, I said our economy is better off than it would be under such a system. Comparing the amount spent does not compare the effect on the economy. The economy is not a zero sum game, the amount of health care goods and services consumed per capita is not a constant, and the GDP per capita of a nation- and thus their ability to afford a given level of health care- would not stay constant when shifting to a socialist health care system.
A relatively free market generally leads to greater economic growth and greater prosperity. In a more prosperous nation, people are able to afford more - and higher quality - goods and services. When people can buy what they want rather than only consuming what some central authority decides they "need," they're likely to buy more.
If you had compared US per-capita spending on food or real estate to that of the USSR you would have seen the same effect. Saying "we were able to reduce health care costs by making everybody wait in a long queue to get most kinds of service" is just like saying "communism can feed the masses more cheaply- through rationing, we only spend $0.25 per person per day on food." The result is not prosperity.
Yes, we can't both do that and be the richest country. You have your causality backwards.
Trying to provide free health care (even of dubious quality like that of most socialized health care systems) would impoverish us. Ignoring the reality of scarce resources, or figuring that queues are better ways to allocate scarce resources than prices, tends to do that.
"What do you mean, the richest country in the world can't provide free land and bread to everyone? But the USSR did, even though they were so poor!"
Sure! Just pad each sample with an extra byte of zeros, upsample, and encode! For instance, sox in.wav -b 24 out.flac -rate 96k does the trick!
That's what many distributors of 24/96 music do anyways, and even if they don't, you wouldn't be able to hear any improvement from 24/96 anyway. 24/96 is great for use in the editing and mastering process, but for listening purposes, both 24-bit and high sampling rates are a waste of space, and though 24-bit is innocuous quality-wise, playback of high-sampling-rate audio often introduces audible distortions.
A developer of a popular audio device firmware told me that they downsample any high-sample-rate files to 44.1k using linear interpolation (fast but bad resampling) and nevertheless lots of people rave about the quality of playing back their 24/96 FLACs using these devices.
I can deal with some rough edges, and if more distros start picking them up as default and if the dev community is healthy, they'll soon pick up enough contributors to smooth those out.
But the xfce dev community doesn't really seem healthy. Instead, it seems to be composed of maladjusted 13-year-olds. Calling your project's utility for connecting additional filesystems a male prostitute "because it mounts what it is told to" may seem like a great laugh in the middle school locker room, but it's immature, offensive, and unprofessional, will turn users away from the project, and will guarantee its rejection for e.g. corporate desktop use.
I have been a fan of xfce in the past, used it quite a bit in the 3.x days, and have an xubuntu vm I use on occasion. But if it's to be a serious contender in the desktop space they have to consider that this isn't just for their own dogfood use and start considering the needs and sensibilities of their users rather than filling it with crass inside jokes between the developers.
I wasn't talking about those who have finished grad school, I was talking about the students who will be likely to take the OP's class.
You really think a college sophomore English paper's consideration of possible counterarguments is "as logically rigorous as doing proofs"? It's not the subject matter, either; you can enumerate the premises in an argument about the Iliad just as well as you can enumerate your assumptions in math, physics, CS, etc. It's that people have driven logic (which had been the core of a liberal arts education for centuries) from the core curriculum, leaving it as the domain of only a few fields. The result is that students outside those fields have never really grappled with the difference between valid argumentation and fallacious reasoning. The quality of the discourse that results may or may not be good enough for the humanities, but it's not good enough for anything that purports to be a science.
they need a set of analytical tools that they can use, not necessarily derive.
While social scientists may not need to be able to re-derive all their statistical tools at a moment's notice, it's most assuredly not enough for them to just have a superficial knowledge of how to use them. They need to understand them. If they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, they will do it wrong as soon as the situation deviates in the slightest from the textbook example, so they are incompetent at doing their job. That's just as true for engineers. Jobs for the people who say "just tell me the formula" went out the window with the slide rule; we don't need human pocket calculators any more. People need to understand the why behind what they're doing so they can have enough logical skill and insight to see how to extend the ideas they've learned to new situations. You don't get that kind of understanding through vigorous hand-waving.
The anonymous poster below posted a link to a study showing that half of published neuroscience papers trying to compare the significance of two effects completely misapplied basic statistics. People get used to "all I have is the hammer of univariate normal distribution p-values and so everything's a nail." The results are largely garbage.
You must not get out much. There already are regulations about where and when you can light campfires in fire season, and they're well-justified.
In many jurisdictions littering cigarette butts is already technically illegal.
Using a magnifying glass is extremely unlikely to cause a fire unless you're deliberately trying to. The only activities where it makes sense to have additional fire-related regulations beyond the normal arson etc laws are activities which bear a significant chance of unintentionally starting a wildfire. Target shooting, especially with steel jacketed rounds, does bear such a chance.
If an act may recklessly endanger the lives and property of others I see no reason why it should not face regulation.
It's true enough that statistics get misused in the hard sciences too. But I really don't think the rates of misuse are as similar as you think.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "thinking rigorously." I'm talking about logical rigor, not difficulty/effort; I certainly don't mean that students in these fields don't have to think or work. But giving memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments on exams and papers in their classes involves very different skills from those involved in e.g. doing a proof. Students who haven't been required to develop and exhibit the latter kind of skills are often impatient and sloppy when they face situations where that kind of thinking is required.
Sometimes I wonder how many misunderstandings are because the fundamental quantities in frequentism just don't mesh with what we intuitively hope/expect to get. Bayesian stats has more than plenty of its own complications, but I wonder whether people might be better able to adapt to those complications.
I don't fear the firearms at all. I fear the kind of wingnuts who are crazy enough to parade around a mall with assault weapons. If they aren't already unstable and murderous they're likely close to the edge.
There is only one logical reason to bring an assault weapon to a mall, and that is that you want to be the next Jared Loughner or Anders Breivik.
If I had a dollar for every paper published in a peer-reviewed social sciences journal which totally abused statistics, I'd retire and use my extra cash to fund organizations directed at basic logic and math education, trying to help with the situation.
Most social studies students I knew had little understanding of the statistics they were using. It was basically a magic incantation for giving them results and making their conclusions sound more credible to other people who likewise didn't understand statistics. The result is bad statistics and bad science. Yes, these people aren't idiots, but they've become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously.
The impression I get is that the pattern persists even among those few who make it into the field. There are some psychologists etc who are really trying to do real science- a difficult task since the basic concepts are even more up in the air than the basic concepts of chemistry were in the days of the alchemists. As far as I can tell, however, quite a lot are quite happy to be able to find ways of running a study so it will inevitably vindicate their preexisting biases and will fudge the statistics to match.
For the OP: You're right to be concerned. Students for the GE stats class are usually woefully underprepared. Rather than giving them the rigorous preparation in logic, multivariate calculus, etc they really need to understand statistics, the GE stats class does the equivalent of the Wizard's favor to the Scarecrow.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a passing grade! Now you understand statistics! Go back to your department now, please. (Phew, they're gone at last. That kind of work may pay the bills here in the Stats dept. but it doesn't do wonders for my sense of academic integrity as an educator.)"
I don't know who the hell you are. I specifically replied to this guy: "This is exactly why nothing changes...
No, you replied to me. As I said, I wondered whether you'd mistakenly replied to the wrong person, since your angry rhetoric aimed against a straw-man proponent of gun control simply didn't apply to me.
Are you kidding? Just because the Utah State Legislature says that carrying an assault rifle around a mall doesn't count as threatening doesn't mean it's not threatening. There's no reason to carry a gun designed only for killing people en masse in such a place except to intimidate people, and just because it's not being pointed at anyone doesn't help anything.
The people who went for cover and called police were doing the only rational thing to do.
Most of these fires, like the one by Saratoga Springs which caused the evacuations, are happening in areas where there is little tinder, and regular controlled fires make little or no difference where the prevailing vegetation is grasses and sagebrush. Grasses and sagebrush don't build up that much over the years.
Not really. They make up a heck of a lot less than 10% of the population, especially here along the Wasatch Front.
It takes some unusual conditions for copper and lead bullets to start fires (not the case for steel-jacketed rounds, or for reactive targets, obviously), but normal procedure for wildfires is to blame firearms if anyone was known or suspected to have been shooting in the vicinity and no other specific cause presents itself. What percentage of the 20 allegedly shooting-caused fires were actually caused by something else is unknowable, but it's likely greater than zero.
Right. All the fires when people were shooting in red-flag warning "tinderbox" conditions were caused by fire fairies or gnomes. Certainly these fires wouldn't have been started by your precious and oh-so-responsible target shooters, whose guns (controlled explosions spitting hot lead or steel against rocks and debris) are oh-so unlikely to spark anything even in such a tinderbox.
Utah state law specifically authorizes municipalities to restrict firearms discharge within their city limits
[citation needed]. I've seen the sections of state code which say "Unless specifically authorized by the Legislature by statute, a local authority or state entity may not enact or enforce any ordinance, regulation, or rule pertaining to firearms" and I've seen the legislature's tendency to try to trump/seize control from cities (esp. SLC) on all kinds of issues; I haven't seen the provision you cite.
Federal law, whether statutory or regulatory, trumps state law and even state constitutions, per Article VI.
If you could teach our state legislators this fact it would be a great accomplishment. They've passed scores of bills that their own legal counsel has said are unconstitutional attempts to trump federal law, and many of them are nullificationists.
I live in Utah. The only parts of the state where anywhere close to even a quarter of households have firearms are low-population areas far away from the Wasatch Front (and far from this fire, the smoke from which was easily visible from where I live). Also, having a firearm in the house certainly doesn't imply that you're a target shooter.
Gang activity and burglary may be lower in Kanab or whatever than in LA but that has little to do with gun ownership.
I don't have any problem with people owning guns. I do have a problem with people leaving spent ammunition and casings all over everywhere, behaving irresponsibly by target shooting outside of gun ranges during a red flag fire warning, and brandishing assault rifles in public. I have an even bigger problem with legislators who are more concerned with protecting irresponsible behavior by gun owners than they are with protecting the public.
No, the acreage for fires in that list is clumped together, so you don't see how many were zero acres unless all the fires in a category added to less than an acre. If 73 fires in one district only burned 290 acres, that doesn't mean each fire burned just under four acres. The acreage per fire probably approximates a power-law distribution (like the Pareto distribution which is behind the 80/20 rule), so the majority of those fires are quite likely under an acre.
If your issue is the fact that there is no framework of law to prohibit, e.g., shooting under certain conditions, in a similar manner as, say, open fires when weather conditions are not safe for fires, then I might begin to agree with you.
This is the more important point and is really the main point of the article. The Utah state legislature has not only failed to put any reasonable regulations on target shooting during red flag warnings, they've passed laws to keep any counties, municipalities, etc from regulating anything about guns at all. For instance, from Utah code 76-10-500:
Unless specifically authorized by the Legislature by statute, a local authority or state entity may not enact or enforce any ordinance, regulation, or rule pertaining to firearms.
As I've said elsewhere, there aren't that many target shooters, and they start a vastly disproportionate number of fires, and these fires have caused considerably more damage than the vast majority of the fires on that silly list (many of those were zero-acre fires).
But more to the point: counties, municipalities, and the BLM, Forest Service, and NPS all have the power to restrict campfires, and they often do put restrictions in place during fire season. But the state legislature has not only failed to put reasonable shooting regulations in place but has barred anyone else from doing so.
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You really think infant mortality has nothing to do with the lifestyles and decisions of the parents? That's absurd.
Number of physicians per person is another irrelevant metric. You continue to ignore the question of what goods and services are provided for the money spent. You need to look at the amount and quality of visits, procedures, medications, equipment, etc received. But instead you'll try yet again to evade this question and change the topic back to universal coverage. Sorry, I have better ways to spend my time than this. Sayonara.
I found the report to which you refer, and they ranked countries' health care by the following metrics of "quality":
Fairness in financial contribution (determined by low cubed absolute deviation in health spending)
Level of health in "disability-adjusted life years"
Distribution of health (low cubed abs. dev.)
Level of "responsiveness"
Distribution of responsiveness (again, low cubed abs. dev)
Health expenditure per capita
and three summary rankings which are based on the others.
With the exception of responsiveness- a metric into which they've shoved many aspects of quality, such as wait times, patient privacy, and patient autonomy- where the US ranked #1, none of these metrics tell us anything about the quality of health care. They don't tell us about the value of medical goods, services, and procedures received.
You cannot rank health care by citizens' health; different people and cultures make different choices with respect to lifestyle, diet, etc. Again, you have to look at the services
Forcing wait times, patient choices, etc to be roughly equal is not generally an improvement. In nationalized health care systems, the long queues for services are an integral part of the system, helping to reduce demand for "free" services enough that the supply can meet it, and consumer choice is equally restricted across the board. You expect such systems to have relatively equal but long wait times and relatively equal but poor patient autonomy. That's not a plus.
I've already explained above why low health expenditures per capita are not an indication of quality health care.
Low variance in health expenditures is actually a measure of restriction on people's freedoms, not of health care quality; people with different incomes will normally be willing to spend different amounts.
I think that by using a nonstandard measure of variation (cubed absolute difference rather than variance/standard deviation) they're fudging the statistics to overemphasize equality of outcomes.
I don't feel at all bad that US health care ranks poorly according to such an arbitrary and useless set of metrics.
Again, if you think people in the US are paying more for the same or inferior service, you have zero comprehension of the facts. Americans receive more health care services, goods, and procedures than the rest of the OECD, they wait less, and by most metrics they have higher quality of care.
That doesn't necessarily mean Americans are healthier; people choose different tradeoffs with regard to lifestyle, diet, etc.
The fact that people choose to consume more health care- and therefore spend more on health care- as their income rises has nothing to do with just giving away money to insurers and some nebulous and malignant profit-gouging "health care industry," and I think you're quite aware that's a red herring.
You act as though there is one level of health care everyone absolutely needs, and that everything beyond that is superfluous; that's absurd. The vast majority of people throughout history lived perfectly normal and productive lives without having regular doctor visits, without ever seeing a dentist, without ever visiting a physical therapist, etc etc. All non-emergency care is basically elective. But most people find that their quality of life and longevity are improved when they undergo elective treatment and therefore they are willing to spend more to receive more.
(Note that when talking about the costs of health care and the need for a socialized system, people often fall back on the caricature of the "industry," because if people think of individual providers they can understand that a doctor should charge the market rate for his or her services. If his or her skills are in high demand, charging a commensurate price is not "gouging," it's the only way to properly reward them for providing such value and the only reasonable way to allocate the scarce resource of their time and services.)
The amount of money or even the percentage of GDP being spent on health care is not a measure of how much the health care system is a burden to the economy. It's totally irrelevant. The economy is not burdened by people producing and consuming goods and services- that is the economy. The fact that people choose to spend their money that way does not mean that they'd be better off if a central planner forced them to spend less of their money on that.
Most health care spending is a luxury good, in that as people's income rises they will choose to spend a greater proportion of their income on health care (if they are permitted to do so). It's true that health care spending as a percent of GDP is high in the US and low in Somalia. Maybe you think it's a waste that people in the US choose to consume more health care goods and services than the British NHS would deem necessary. Well, I think it's a waste for people to spend money on beer hats and pet mausoleums, but that doesn't mean that I think government should regulate these markets or that the economy would be better off if it did.
The economy is burdened by higher taxes and/or higher debt, by restrictions on what medical goods and services can be bought or sold, and by all the associated deadweight losses.
If you don't think nationalized health care systems involve health care rationing and queues, you're fooling yourself. Wait times for hospital visits, specialist appointments, and non-emergency surgery are all at least twice as long on average in Canada and the UK as they are in the USA.
It is generally illegal for doctors to charge patients for goods, services, or procedures which fall under the scope of the British NHS or Canada's Medicare, so you can't receive those goods/services/procedures unless it's permitted by the national system's guidelines- for instance, you have to have a referral from your "gatekeeper" GP to visit a specialist, and if he/she doesn't deem it medically necessary you are pretty much SOL. That is rationing.
I wasn't equating any of these nations' overall economies to that of the USSR; I was pointing out that socialized health care is not very different from socializing any other aspect of the economy- like the market for food- and carries similar dangers.
I made no claim that our health costs are lower than those of nations with socialist health care, I said our economy is better off than it would be under such a system. Comparing the amount spent does not compare the effect on the economy. The economy is not a zero sum game, the amount of health care goods and services consumed per capita is not a constant, and the GDP per capita of a nation- and thus their ability to afford a given level of health care- would not stay constant when shifting to a socialist health care system.
A relatively free market generally leads to greater economic growth and greater prosperity. In a more prosperous nation, people are able to afford more - and higher quality - goods and services. When people can buy what they want rather than only consuming what some central authority decides they "need," they're likely to buy more.
If you had compared US per-capita spending on food or real estate to that of the USSR you would have seen the same effect. Saying "we were able to reduce health care costs by making everybody wait in a long queue to get most kinds of service" is just like saying "communism can feed the masses more cheaply- through rationing, we only spend $0.25 per person per day on food." The result is not prosperity.
Yes, we can't both do that and be the richest country. You have your causality backwards.
Trying to provide free health care (even of dubious quality like that of most socialized health care systems) would impoverish us. Ignoring the reality of scarce resources, or figuring that queues are better ways to allocate scarce resources than prices, tends to do that.
"What do you mean, the richest country in the world can't provide free land and bread to everyone? But the USSR did, even though they were so poor!"
Sure! Just pad each sample with an extra byte of zeros, upsample, and encode! For instance, sox in.wav -b 24 out.flac -rate 96k does the trick!
That's what many distributors of 24/96 music do anyways, and even if they don't, you wouldn't be able to hear any improvement from 24/96 anyway. 24/96 is great for use in the editing and mastering process, but for listening purposes, both 24-bit and high sampling rates are a waste of space, and though 24-bit is innocuous quality-wise, playback of high-sampling-rate audio often introduces audible distortions.
A developer of a popular audio device firmware told me that they downsample any high-sample-rate files to 44.1k using linear interpolation (fast but bad resampling) and nevertheless lots of people rave about the quality of playing back their 24/96 FLACs using these devices.
I can deal with some rough edges, and if more distros start picking them up as default and if the dev community is healthy, they'll soon pick up enough contributors to smooth those out.
But the xfce dev community doesn't really seem healthy. Instead, it seems to be composed of maladjusted 13-year-olds. Calling your project's utility for connecting additional filesystems a male prostitute "because it mounts what it is told to" may seem like a great laugh in the middle school locker room, but it's immature, offensive, and unprofessional, will turn users away from the project, and will guarantee its rejection for e.g. corporate desktop use.
I have been a fan of xfce in the past, used it quite a bit in the 3.x days, and have an xubuntu vm I use on occasion. But if it's to be a serious contender in the desktop space they have to consider that this isn't just for their own dogfood use and start considering the needs and sensibilities of their users rather than filling it with crass inside jokes between the developers.
I wasn't talking about those who have finished grad school, I was talking about the students who will be likely to take the OP's class.
You really think a college sophomore English paper's consideration of possible counterarguments is "as logically rigorous as doing proofs"? It's not the subject matter, either; you can enumerate the premises in an argument about the Iliad just as well as you can enumerate your assumptions in math, physics, CS, etc. It's that people have driven logic (which had been the core of a liberal arts education for centuries) from the core curriculum, leaving it as the domain of only a few fields. The result is that students outside those fields have never really grappled with the difference between valid argumentation and fallacious reasoning. The quality of the discourse that results may or may not be good enough for the humanities, but it's not good enough for anything that purports to be a science.
While social scientists may not need to be able to re-derive all their statistical tools at a moment's notice, it's most assuredly not enough for them to just have a superficial knowledge of how to use them. They need to understand them. If they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, they will do it wrong as soon as the situation deviates in the slightest from the textbook example, so they are incompetent at doing their job. That's just as true for engineers. Jobs for the people who say "just tell me the formula" went out the window with the slide rule; we don't need human pocket calculators any more. People need to understand the why behind what they're doing so they can have enough logical skill and insight to see how to extend the ideas they've learned to new situations. You don't get that kind of understanding through vigorous hand-waving.
The anonymous poster below posted a link to a study showing that half of published neuroscience papers trying to compare the significance of two effects completely misapplied basic statistics. People get used to "all I have is the hammer of univariate normal distribution p-values and so everything's a nail." The results are largely garbage.
You're delusional. You apparently have no understanding of what rationality is.
Hint: P(murderous intent | carrying assault weapon in public place) >> P(murderous intent | has two hands).
You must not get out much. There already are regulations about where and when you can light campfires in fire season, and they're well-justified.
In many jurisdictions littering cigarette butts is already technically illegal.
Using a magnifying glass is extremely unlikely to cause a fire unless you're deliberately trying to. The only activities where it makes sense to have additional fire-related regulations beyond the normal arson etc laws are activities which bear a significant chance of unintentionally starting a wildfire. Target shooting, especially with steel jacketed rounds, does bear such a chance.
If an act may recklessly endanger the lives and property of others I see no reason why it should not face regulation.
It's true enough that statistics get misused in the hard sciences too. But I really don't think the rates of misuse are as similar as you think.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "thinking rigorously." I'm talking about logical rigor, not difficulty/effort; I certainly don't mean that students in these fields don't have to think or work. But giving memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments on exams and papers in their classes involves very different skills from those involved in e.g. doing a proof. Students who haven't been required to develop and exhibit the latter kind of skills are often impatient and sloppy when they face situations where that kind of thinking is required.
You're absolutely right that problems with misunderstanding and abusing statistics are by no means unique to the social sciences.
But I do think that e.g. physics students, who have to have halfway decent mathematical literacy for other reasons, are usually better prepared to understand. Not that that makes them immune to other factors which cause biased results and fudged statistics, but it helps.
Sometimes I wonder how many misunderstandings are because the fundamental quantities in frequentism just don't mesh with what we intuitively hope/expect to get. Bayesian stats has more than plenty of its own complications, but I wonder whether people might be better able to adapt to those complications.
I don't fear the firearms at all. I fear the kind of wingnuts who are crazy enough to parade around a mall with assault weapons. If they aren't already unstable and murderous they're likely close to the edge.
There is only one logical reason to bring an assault weapon to a mall, and that is that you want to be the next Jared Loughner or Anders Breivik.
If I had a dollar for every paper published in a peer-reviewed social sciences journal which totally abused statistics, I'd retire and use my extra cash to fund organizations directed at basic logic and math education, trying to help with the situation.
Most social studies students I knew had little understanding of the statistics they were using. It was basically a magic incantation for giving them results and making their conclusions sound more credible to other people who likewise didn't understand statistics. The result is bad statistics and bad science. Yes, these people aren't idiots, but they've become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously.
The impression I get is that the pattern persists even among those few who make it into the field. There are some psychologists etc who are really trying to do real science- a difficult task since the basic concepts are even more up in the air than the basic concepts of chemistry were in the days of the alchemists. As far as I can tell, however, quite a lot are quite happy to be able to find ways of running a study so it will inevitably vindicate their preexisting biases and will fudge the statistics to match.
For the OP: You're right to be concerned. Students for the GE stats class are usually woefully underprepared. Rather than giving them the rigorous preparation in logic, multivariate calculus, etc they really need to understand statistics, the GE stats class does the equivalent of the Wizard's favor to the Scarecrow.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a passing grade! Now you understand statistics! Go back to your department now, please. (Phew, they're gone at last. That kind of work may pay the bills here in the Stats dept. but it doesn't do wonders for my sense of academic integrity as an educator.)"
No, you replied to me. As I said, I wondered whether you'd mistakenly replied to the wrong person, since your angry rhetoric aimed against a straw-man proponent of gun control simply didn't apply to me.
I don't see why you're confused. Dry grasses and sagebrush are very flammable.
Are you kidding? Just because the Utah State Legislature says that carrying an assault rifle around a mall doesn't count as threatening doesn't mean it's not threatening. There's no reason to carry a gun designed only for killing people en masse in such a place except to intimidate people, and just because it's not being pointed at anyone doesn't help anything.
The people who went for cover and called police were doing the only rational thing to do.
Most of these fires, like the one by Saratoga Springs which caused the evacuations, are happening in areas where there is little tinder, and regular controlled fires make little or no difference where the prevailing vegetation is grasses and sagebrush. Grasses and sagebrush don't build up that much over the years.
Not really. They make up a heck of a lot less than 10% of the population, especially here along the Wasatch Front.
Right. All the fires when people were shooting in red-flag warning "tinderbox" conditions were caused by fire fairies or gnomes. Certainly these fires wouldn't have been started by your precious and oh-so-responsible target shooters, whose guns (controlled explosions spitting hot lead or steel against rocks and debris) are oh-so unlikely to spark anything even in such a tinderbox.
[citation needed]. I've seen the sections of state code which say "Unless specifically authorized by the Legislature by statute, a local authority or state entity may not enact or enforce any ordinance, regulation, or rule pertaining to firearms" and I've seen the legislature's tendency to try to trump/seize control from cities (esp. SLC) on all kinds of issues; I haven't seen the provision you cite.
If you could teach our state legislators this fact it would be a great accomplishment. They've passed scores of bills that their own legal counsel has said are unconstitutional attempts to trump federal law, and many of them are nullificationists.
I live in Utah. The only parts of the state where anywhere close to even a quarter of households have firearms are low-population areas far away from the Wasatch Front (and far from this fire, the smoke from which was easily visible from where I live). Also, having a firearm in the house certainly doesn't imply that you're a target shooter.
Gang activity and burglary may be lower in Kanab or whatever than in LA but that has little to do with gun ownership.
I don't have any problem with people owning guns. I do have a problem with people leaving spent ammunition and casings all over everywhere, behaving irresponsibly by target shooting outside of gun ranges during a red flag fire warning, and brandishing assault rifles in public. I have an even bigger problem with legislators who are more concerned with protecting irresponsible behavior by gun owners than they are with protecting the public.
No, the acreage for fires in that list is clumped together, so you don't see how many were zero acres unless all the fires in a category added to less than an acre. If 73 fires in one district only burned 290 acres, that doesn't mean each fire burned just under four acres. The acreage per fire probably approximates a power-law distribution (like the Pareto distribution which is behind the 80/20 rule), so the majority of those fires are quite likely under an acre.
Regardless of whether they intended to start a fire, they should face punishment for reckless burning, a class A misdemeanor; they either knew (or should have known) there was a risk of causing a fire, and simply thinking "It won't happen to me" isn't good enough.
This is the more important point and is really the main point of the article. The Utah state legislature has not only failed to put any reasonable regulations on target shooting during red flag warnings, they've passed laws to keep any counties, municipalities, etc from regulating anything about guns at all . For instance, from Utah code 76-10-500 :
There's no justification for calling that post flamebait. Moderators with a political agenda trying to suppress my comment for pointing out the facts.
As I've said elsewhere, there aren't that many target shooters, and they start a vastly disproportionate number of fires, and these fires have caused considerably more damage than the vast majority of the fires on that silly list (many of those were zero-acre fires).
But more to the point: counties, municipalities, and the BLM, Forest Service, and NPS all have the power to restrict campfires, and they often do put restrictions in place during fire season. But the state legislature has not only failed to put reasonable shooting regulations in place but has barred anyone else from doing so.