a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by b_b
b_b  ·  1261 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Partisan COVID

I keep getting a "forbidden" message when I try to load the page--even happens when I try to navigate there directly. Anyone else?





dublinben  ·  1261 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The site appears to be down. Here's the Google cached copy.

wasoxygen  ·  1261 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Same here. Try this.

b_b  ·  1261 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks. This is what Twain was talking about when he said, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics," or whatever the exact quote was. I'm no way defending the practices of leaders who didn't urge caution, but if Pfizer showed us their vaccine data, and they said "all the people treated after Sept 15 were protected from the virus," we would (rightly) throw a fit. If there is no a priori reason to subdivide a dataset, then there is no reason to subdivide a dataset. It's that simple. I could get on my high horse about this all day (it's one of the big issues plaguing science), but I won't. I'll simply say that post-hoc analyses are almost all bullshit.

Forgetting science for a minute and just focusing on the human, I also have a problem with this type of red/blue dividing of people. It presupposes that (1) all the people of a given state are of a similar political persuasion; (2) people of that political persuasion don't deserve sympathy from the other side; and (3) the mistakes of leaders mean that everyone deserves the suffering (collective punishment). I wonder what the analysis would come out as if, say, all the Native Americans were excluded. Certainly the virus isn't their fault, but they live primarily in "red" states and have suffered the highest infection rates of any demographic, as far as I've read.

God I hate Twitter.