Data can show anything YOU or I want to prove - real science tries to eliminate the confirmation bias. That's why you make a prediction, get more data, and then compare the data to your prediction and throw out or keep the model that produced the prediction. Viola - science!
If confirmation bias is messing up your science, you're doing it wrong.
Yes, this is a REAL concern, rather than this CO2 nonsense. NOx, CO, and smog are all REAL health hazards.
You know, it's funny. I got modded troll something like a thousand times for talking about how my own calculations showed that CO2 literally couldn't cause global warming, because the heat capacity is simply too low. In fact, increasing atmospheric CO2 decrease the net heat capacity of the atmosphere (by a vanishingly small margin). Suddenly, this new data backs me up. Funny how a chemist in a totally unrelated field can show how an entire branch of science is BS. Too bad the only reaction that anyone can come up with to such challenges is "UR N IDOT".
It's great if you were right, and it's valuable to provide an informed critique of the scientific consensus, but until you publish your calculations, have them peer-reviewed and open to critique from the scientific community, you're just a guy on a message board - a message board with lots of guys who think they are smarter than everyone else, so you shouldn't be surprised if you have a hard time getting through.
Maybe this will change everything in climate science - maybe not. We'll see soon, but this is potentially VERY good news, because it's clear that we are not politically capable of preparing for worst-case climate scenarios in a way that won't kill tens/hundreds of millions. If we have fewer bad things to worry about, awesome, but there are still the other bad things, as you rightly point out.
Chemisor, that's ridiculous - tons of things happen that poll as 5% less popular than the other option. The debt crisis involves a complex series of tradeoffs, and polling along the lines of "would you rather let millionaires keep their tax cuts, or cut all services to the poor" might get us more accurate information.
After all, we could avoid raising the debt ceiling by simply instituting a serious estate tax and bringing up marginal rates on the superwealthy to something close to first-world standards. Or we could do it by getting rid of SS (but keeping the SS taxes). Or by firing all our teachers. Lots of ways to go about it, and a simple 47-42 majority in a poll you read shouldn't dictate policy the way you indicate.
We voted for him with our eyeballs and dollars. Sorry you live in a society with a belief in the freedom to express your opinions and ideas. I know you must hate it. That's why you have to come here to express your opinions and ideas. But people don't give a shit about what you say, so it's not fair. Right?
A dollar shouldn't be a relevant unit of power in a democracy.
The legal obligations of purported news sources not to lie should be stronger, so at least one distortion on our system could be reduced. You think it's just sour grapes when someone wishes they could be heard, but when they are systematically excluded due to preferential treatment given to the wealthy, it's a legitimate complaint - at least, if you believe in anything like a democratic process.
Empiric, you are a fantastic troll, if that's what you are. If not, you should not try to move so quickly between "120 is the upper limit of human (male) lifespan so far, and therefore forever," where you are already on slippery ground to "the facts that exist agree with me," as if to declare victory for all of Biblical literalism. Even if the entirety of your bizarre 120-year-limit claim is true, it proves absolutely nothing about the verity of the Bible, except that sometimes there are coincidental truths in in.
All relevant evidence which exists in the fields of biology, geology, cosmology, archaeology, and paleontology disagree with young earth creationism, which is why it has been left on the dustheap of history, where it is in its death throes.
So, it sounds like you will give up your faith if this (and, may we assume, any claim in the Bible) is shown to be inaccurate. Is that true?
It seems like a ridiculous position, but if you don't hold it, I don't know why you would bother arguing this inane 120 years point (and engaging in some extremely frustrating rationalizations in order to do so).
I don't mind people having faith - I mind when faith motivates bad reasoning.
While I realize that you aren't going to change your mind, I think it's fair to warn you that there are a lot of incorrect things in the Bible as well, so trying to say we should believe in God based upon the hit rate of scientific claims one can extract from the Bible is a fool's game and you shouldn't play it.
For instance, at least one person has lived past 120, and most don't reach that, so the claim you brought into this discussion (presumably the strongest one you know off the top of your head) is weak for most definitions of accuracy with 120 as the upper bound of lifespan.
Not only is the killer bee problem much less of a problem than people think it is, but the potential loss of the world's honeybees is a much WORSE problem than people think it is. It's another case of the less-sexy story being more important by orders of magnitude.
One day we will have to, as a species, find an ethical way of limiting population growth. Might as well start now. (Which is to say, yes, we should continue to cure diseases and treat sick people, and make the problem more acute, since the worst possible outcome - genocide, is roughly equivalent to not providing healthcare to the poor, which you propose)
1) the Daily Mail is a bottom feeder tabloid 2) Andrew Wakefield's research paper was pulled by The Lancet due to back room deals with the supporting agency of the anti-vaccine crusaders.
Not only did Wakefield have a huge conflict of interest, but his study has been demonstrated to have included false date (in his sample size of twelve!!!), and he is no longer a doctor due to his incompetent and hugely unethical behavior.
Somebody mod GP down, please, as uninformative and misleading.
Mr. Slippery, I love how you use links to your blog as references in your arguments against vaccination. You, like many anti-vax folks (even though I commend your endorsement of at least some modern medicine used to fight "real threats," as you call them) completely ignore the benefits of herd immunity.
I clicked through to your blog, just to see if you were bringing up something new or relevant, and found your logic further undermined by the quotes you tried to use there. If seasonal flu generally doesn't hospitalize healthy folks under 65, perhaps you should ask how narrow that definition of healthy is (doesn't include asthmatics, which might surprise some) and whether there are benefits to vaccinating people who would survive an infection (hint - if you're vaccinated properly, you won't act a a disease vector and kill your immuno-compromised, old, or young acquaintances and family members).
Sure, influence of industry is always something to worry about - but we shouldn't be stupid just to spite for-profit companies, which is what your attitude might lead to.
Influenza is a real threat, has killed tens of millions over the last century, and the likelihood of suffering from it or giving it to someone can be significantly lowered by getting the shot. Period.
If your immune system is weakened, get a flu shot. If you're a hypochondriac munchausens case, we'll, if it will shut you up, go ahead, get a shot. But I believe his point (speculating) is the vast majority of the healthy population doesn't need a flu vaccine. He certainly isn't boasting he's found the cause of autism
Not a smart point. If you are healthy, you should get a vaccine, because you could carry it to your old granny or your 3-week-old infant niece, and kill them. The vast majority DOES need a vaccine, that's how we get "herd immunity."
The GP's tone might have been a little shrill, but you are reading way too much into this issue. Evolution is NOT a central tenet of atheism, it's just a true scientific theory that happens to be frequently rejected by religious people. Atheists, when pointing out the ways that religious people believe stupid things, find evolution a handy example of established science being rejected for theological reasons.
The difference between the two groups is that atheists accept evolution, like all other current scientific theories, because it's our best current scientific theory in its field, rather than for some sort of political/cultural reason. Certain brands of Christianity deny evolution because their belief system is more important to them than a reasoned understanding of reality.
They aren't playing the same game. Atheists, and many religious people the world over, accept reality and the results of our investigations into it. Certain religious folks, quite loudly at home, reject our best understanding of reality in favor of a belief system that is unprovable, usually by definition.
Ok, new Slashdot layout, how the hell do I "Read The Rest Of This Comment"?
Clicking on that link just shows me the same top portion of the comment.
This is probably a case of user error - there's only one two-line paragraph that makes up the rest of the comment, hard to notice the change. We'll all be fine with the redesign in 6 weeks.
You've repeated yourself dozens of times in this thread, and as far as I can tell, convinced no one that Apple invented the word "app."
No one is missing anything 'clever' about the name - it's convenient for Apple that app is the first syllable of apple, but your standards for clever seem to be out of whack. I am sure you could make a point, if you tried, in a way that was less thick-headed than asking everyone to believe that 'app' is a completely new word, and that we are all idiots who just don't understand the nuance of this brilliant, counter-intuitive, not-at-all-the-obvious-name-for-a-store-that-sells-apps, naming strategy Apple had.
They named it the App Store because that is the generic name for it, and they wanted to be the default. That's it.
Federal pensions are not 'charity' - they are job perks guaranteed to our employees at the time of their employment, and reneging on those guarantees is reprehensible.
I'm not sure they're that confident in their evidence. Nor should they be - they did a study, they publish their findings, lots of other scientists either put down rebuttals (as has already happened), or repeat the study and see if it's accurate enough to be true. That's the way science is supposed to work.
What's not supposed to happen is "Scientist A does an apparently sound study that appears to demonstrate something that scientists B,C, and D consider silly, and scientists B, C, and D stop scientist A's work from ever seeing the light of day."
They shouldn't be confident in their evidence - you are right about the way science should be done, but I think in this case the rebuttals are easy to find because this paper seems to be the result of significance-chasing, with enough simultaneous 'experiments' going on within each individual experiment (i.e., the 'experiment' to determine whether men were affected by Thing Type A was a subset of the experiment of whether anyone was affected by Things Type A,B,C, or D) that it would be surprising if significant deviations didn't occur.
This exact problem exists, with added moral hazard, in drug companies doing trials, which is why we should always require that the data of ALL drug trials be made public - otherwise, a drug company desperate for a win could run 20 different studies, and usually get a 95% significant result above placebo on even a placebo! It's important to consider the number of chances someone has to make their case, in random trials, not just whether one study or way of slicing the data seems to make the case.
For those who haven't seen it, here's a pretty sharp takedown of this paper, as well as some notes on statistical significance in social sciences in general: www.ruudwetzels.com/articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf
Here are the ideas that are considered heretical by the true believers in global warming:
3) The Earth has been cooling since 2007.
Wow! That's such a pronounced and noteworthy trend! The US has had a reduced economic output for almost the same period of time (along with much of the planet). This must mean that the US economy hasn't grown or been affected by human activity over the last 200+years. On a serious note, if you argue against something that weakly, you shouldn't be surprised when people assume your position is weak.
Slashdot Mirror
Data can show anything YOU or I want to prove - real science tries to eliminate the confirmation bias. That's why you make a prediction, get more data, and then compare the data to your prediction and throw out or keep the model that produced the prediction. Viola - science!
If confirmation bias is messing up your science, you're doing it wrong.
Yes, this is a REAL concern, rather than this CO2 nonsense. NOx, CO, and smog are all REAL health hazards.
You know, it's funny. I got modded troll something like a thousand times for talking about how my own calculations showed that CO2 literally couldn't cause global warming, because the heat capacity is simply too low. In fact, increasing atmospheric CO2 decrease the net heat capacity of the atmosphere (by a vanishingly small margin). Suddenly, this new data backs me up. Funny how a chemist in a totally unrelated field can show how an entire branch of science is BS. Too bad the only reaction that anyone can come up with to such challenges is "UR N IDOT".
It's great if you were right, and it's valuable to provide an informed critique of the scientific consensus, but until you publish your calculations, have them peer-reviewed and open to critique from the scientific community, you're just a guy on a message board - a message board with lots of guys who think they are smarter than everyone else, so you shouldn't be surprised if you have a hard time getting through.
Maybe this will change everything in climate science - maybe not. We'll see soon, but this is potentially VERY good news, because it's clear that we are not politically capable of preparing for worst-case climate scenarios in a way that won't kill tens/hundreds of millions. If we have fewer bad things to worry about, awesome, but there are still the other bad things, as you rightly point out.
Chemisor, that's ridiculous - tons of things happen that poll as 5% less popular than the other option. The debt crisis involves a complex series of tradeoffs, and polling along the lines of "would you rather let millionaires keep their tax cuts, or cut all services to the poor" might get us more accurate information.
After all, we could avoid raising the debt ceiling by simply instituting a serious estate tax and bringing up marginal rates on the superwealthy to something close to first-world standards. Or we could do it by getting rid of SS (but keeping the SS taxes). Or by firing all our teachers. Lots of ways to go about it, and a simple 47-42 majority in a poll you read shouldn't dictate policy the way you indicate.
We voted for him with our eyeballs and dollars. Sorry you live in a society with a belief in the freedom to express your opinions and ideas. I know you must hate it. That's why you have to come here to express your opinions and ideas. But people don't give a shit about what you say, so it's not fair. Right?
A dollar shouldn't be a relevant unit of power in a democracy.
The legal obligations of purported news sources not to lie should be stronger, so at least one distortion on our system could be reduced. You think it's just sour grapes when someone wishes they could be heard, but when they are systematically excluded due to preferential treatment given to the wealthy, it's a legitimate complaint - at least, if you believe in anything like a democratic process.
Empiric, you are a fantastic troll, if that's what you are. If not, you should not try to move so quickly between "120 is the upper limit of human (male) lifespan so far, and therefore forever," where you are already on slippery ground to "the facts that exist agree with me," as if to declare victory for all of Biblical literalism. Even if the entirety of your bizarre 120-year-limit claim is true, it proves absolutely nothing about the verity of the Bible, except that sometimes there are coincidental truths in in.
All relevant evidence which exists in the fields of biology, geology, cosmology, archaeology, and paleontology disagree with young earth creationism, which is why it has been left on the dustheap of history, where it is in its death throes.
So, it sounds like you will give up your faith if this (and, may we assume, any claim in the Bible) is shown to be inaccurate. Is that true?
It seems like a ridiculous position, but if you don't hold it, I don't know why you would bother arguing this inane 120 years point (and engaging in some extremely frustrating rationalizations in order to do so).
I don't mind people having faith - I mind when faith motivates bad reasoning.
While I realize that you aren't going to change your mind, I think it's fair to warn you that there are a lot of incorrect things in the Bible as well, so trying to say we should believe in God based upon the hit rate of scientific claims one can extract from the Bible is a fool's game and you shouldn't play it.
For instance, at least one person has lived past 120, and most don't reach that, so the claim you brought into this discussion (presumably the strongest one you know off the top of your head) is weak for most definitions of accuracy with 120 as the upper bound of lifespan.
Mod Parent Up!
Not only is the killer bee problem much less of a problem than people think it is, but the potential loss of the world's honeybees is a much WORSE problem than people think it is. It's another case of the less-sexy story being more important by orders of magnitude.
I see you're going for the rare "Redundant First Post." Bold.
Most fire departments in the US are volunteer. And the Interstate system was built to move troops and equipment quickly. Like Germany's Autobahn.
Does the equipment volunteer as well?
...before computers came along and made our lives so much -easier-?
Not fly anywhere, because it was too expensive.
Worth noting/googling: "Chromosome counts in the house mouse species (Mus domesticus) range from 2n = 22 to 40 (Nachman et al. 1994)."
Toenails don't keep growing - your flesh shrinks, exposing more of them.
One day we will have to, as a species, find an ethical way of limiting population growth. Might as well start now. (Which is to say, yes, we should continue to cure diseases and treat sick people, and make the problem more acute, since the worst possible outcome - genocide, is roughly equivalent to not providing healthcare to the poor, which you propose)
Two things:
1) the Daily Mail is a bottom feeder tabloid
2) Andrew Wakefield's research paper was pulled by The Lancet due to back room deals with the supporting agency of the anti-vaccine crusaders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
Not only did Wakefield have a huge conflict of interest, but his study has been demonstrated to have included false date (in his sample size of twelve!!!), and he is no longer a doctor due to his incompetent and hugely unethical behavior.
Somebody mod GP down, please, as uninformative and misleading.
Mr. Slippery, I love how you use links to your blog as references in your arguments against vaccination. You, like many anti-vax folks (even though I commend your endorsement of at least some modern medicine used to fight "real threats," as you call them) completely ignore the benefits of herd immunity.
I clicked through to your blog, just to see if you were bringing up something new or relevant, and found your logic further undermined by the quotes you tried to use there. If seasonal flu generally doesn't hospitalize healthy folks under 65, perhaps you should ask how narrow that definition of healthy is (doesn't include asthmatics, which might surprise some) and whether there are benefits to vaccinating people who would survive an infection (hint - if you're vaccinated properly, you won't act a a disease vector and kill your immuno-compromised, old, or young acquaintances and family members).
Sure, influence of industry is always something to worry about - but we shouldn't be stupid just to spite for-profit companies, which is what your attitude might lead to.
Influenza is a real threat, has killed tens of millions over the last century, and the likelihood of suffering from it or giving it to someone can be significantly lowered by getting the shot. Period.
If your immune system is weakened, get a flu shot. If you're a hypochondriac munchausens case, we'll, if it will shut you up, go ahead, get a shot. But I believe his point (speculating) is the vast majority of the healthy population doesn't need a flu vaccine. He certainly isn't boasting he's found the cause of autism
Not a smart point. If you are healthy, you should get a vaccine, because you could carry it to your old granny or your 3-week-old infant niece, and kill them. The vast majority DOES need a vaccine, that's how we get "herd immunity."
The GP's tone might have been a little shrill, but you are reading way too much into this issue. Evolution is NOT a central tenet of atheism, it's just a true scientific theory that happens to be frequently rejected by religious people. Atheists, when pointing out the ways that religious people believe stupid things, find evolution a handy example of established science being rejected for theological reasons.
The difference between the two groups is that atheists accept evolution, like all other current scientific theories, because it's our best current scientific theory in its field, rather than for some sort of political/cultural reason. Certain brands of Christianity deny evolution because their belief system is more important to them than a reasoned understanding of reality.
They aren't playing the same game. Atheists, and many religious people the world over, accept reality and the results of our investigations into it. Certain religious folks, quite loudly at home, reject our best understanding of reality in favor of a belief system that is unprovable, usually by definition.
Ok, new Slashdot layout, how the hell do I "Read The Rest Of This Comment"?
Clicking on that link just shows me the same top portion of the comment.
This is probably a case of user error - there's only one two-line paragraph that makes up the rest of the comment, hard to notice the change. We'll all be fine with the redesign in 6 weeks.
You've repeated yourself dozens of times in this thread, and as far as I can tell, convinced no one that Apple invented the word "app."
No one is missing anything 'clever' about the name - it's convenient for Apple that app is the first syllable of apple, but your standards for clever seem to be out of whack. I am sure you could make a point, if you tried, in a way that was less thick-headed than asking everyone to believe that 'app' is a completely new word, and that we are all idiots who just don't understand the nuance of this brilliant, counter-intuitive, not-at-all-the-obvious-name-for-a-store-that-sells-apps, naming strategy Apple had.
They named it the App Store because that is the generic name for it, and they wanted to be the default. That's it.
Federal pensions are not 'charity' - they are job perks guaranteed to our employees at the time of their employment, and reneging on those guarantees is reprehensible.
Sadly, there's a lot of money in junk science.
Fortunately, there's even bigger money in Big Pharma.
Fixed that for ya.
I'm not sure they're that confident in their evidence. Nor should they be - they did a study, they publish their findings, lots of other scientists either put down rebuttals (as has already happened), or repeat the study and see if it's accurate enough to be true. That's the way science is supposed to work.
What's not supposed to happen is "Scientist A does an apparently sound study that appears to demonstrate something that scientists B,C, and D consider silly, and scientists B, C, and D stop scientist A's work from ever seeing the light of day."
They shouldn't be confident in their evidence - you are right about the way science should be done, but I think in this case the rebuttals are easy to find because this paper seems to be the result of significance-chasing, with enough simultaneous 'experiments' going on within each individual experiment (i.e., the 'experiment' to determine whether men were affected by Thing Type A was a subset of the experiment of whether anyone was affected by Things Type A,B,C, or D) that it would be surprising if significant deviations didn't occur.
This exact problem exists, with added moral hazard, in drug companies doing trials, which is why we should always require that the data of ALL drug trials be made public - otherwise, a drug company desperate for a win could run 20 different studies, and usually get a 95% significant result above placebo on even a placebo! It's important to consider the number of chances someone has to make their case, in random trials, not just whether one study or way of slicing the data seems to make the case.
For those who haven't seen it, here's a pretty sharp takedown of this paper, as well as some notes on statistical significance in social sciences in general: www.ruudwetzels.com/articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf
Here are the ideas that are considered heretical by the true believers in global warming:
3) The Earth has been cooling since 2007.
Wow! That's such a pronounced and noteworthy trend! The US has had a reduced economic output for almost the same period of time (along with much of the planet). This must mean that the US economy hasn't grown or been affected by human activity over the last 200+years. On a serious note, if you argue against something that weakly, you shouldn't be surprised when people assume your position is weak.