William M. Briggs

The linked article/statistics is this: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/ It might seem that the countries with no lockdown are doing better than those with lockdown from the graph alone. However, that interpretation is very biased and I want to repeat a trope: correlation is not causation. It is hinted that no lockdown has fewer deaths than lockdown "If anything, these are are clustered at the lower end of death rates", but as it follows up "but the evidence is far from conclusive". It could be that countries with no lockdown have fewer deaths because there's no lockdown, but it could also mean absolutely anything. It could mean that those countries that are hit worst issue a lockdown (such as UK, that was trying to avoid the lockdown until it got very bad, then issued it), or that they are unrelated, or ...

> Trying to pin down a universal moral code is a fool's errand. Yeah, it is a complex subject. Philosophers talked about it for thousands of years, and I think they have not came to a definite conclusion yet. But on the topic of non absolute morality I like to compare it with a language. Lets for example take English. There are billions people who know English. Even I claim I know English, though I'm sure I'll fail any formal exam. Native speakers are better at exams then me, but do they all follow the formal grammar? Or maybe they all follow some informal rules of English? Can we say that all of them will agree about the meaning of any English sentence? Of course not. Each person has their own understanding of English, each has their own style of using English. There is no such thing as an "absolute English". The most closest attempt to define it is the English grammar, but it doesn't explain all the ways English is used. We come to an important question: how we can talk about such thing as "English" if there is no living example of English such that anyone will unconditionally agree with their authority? My answer is the very notion of "English" is an abstraction, that kinda work in some cases, but fails spectacularly in others. People tend to invent such notions just for a convenience, but reality is more complex, the boundaries of languages are fuzzy, and moreover there is no middle ground, no average[1]. You can deal with it somehow, choosing just the right method…

This is a very interesting piece to read. The amazing thing to me is how smart people can look at the same evidence and come to very different conclusions. To get the feel of this piece, you really need to read it along with the comments. The author of the piece is a very talented statistician, with a PhD in Mathematical Statistics (I hesitate to think of what other kind of statistics someone might study?), a Masters in Atmospheric physics, and a BA in Meteorology. Without question, he is very extremely well qualified on paper to make write the post he did: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?page_id=1085 The main critical commentator is David Appell. He's a freelance writer who's been concentrating and reporting on global warming issues for many years. He's got a PhD, Masters, and BA in Physics, has interviewed most of the main scientists in the field multiple times, and understands the issues as well as or better than anyone else writing about it in the mainstream press: http://davidappell.com/ And it appears that the two completely disagree about practically every line in the article! Without doubting the credentials or understanding of either, I can't shake the feeling that one is following the data wherever it leads, and the other could rationalize any result under the sun and not be knocked off a single one of his talking points. And I'm sure that others can read the piece and the comments and have exactly the opposite reaction. What is it about their prose that can…

> I think there has been a very pernicious, detrimental focus in recent history on ensuring "happiness." Life is not about being happy. Communities do not exist to make people happy. I am familiar with the argument and you are free to think that, of course. My view is that happiness is our ultimate internal gauge. Any alternative to wanting to be happy is typically some form of religion (including some political ideologies). I am willing to sacrifice for the people I love or even for strangers, but that's because it makes me happy. Most people will arrive at the same conclusion if they're honest with themselves. > Define "bigger". Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, all have governments that are significantly more activist in the daily lives of their citizens, and the wealth gap does not exist in those countries like it does the US. I define "bigger" as government spending per capita. Take this graph: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7373 Then compare it with this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States Give the NSA disclosures, the size and activity of the US military and the fact that the USA has the largest percentage of its citizens arrested of all countries in the world -- the majority for victimless crimes, it's maybe hard to argue that the other countries you mention have bigger or more intrusive governments. I live in Germany and the only intrusion in my life is that I don't have to pay for health care. Notice that I'm not…

It got ruined earlier than that. See "The Ph.D. Octopus", by William James, 1903. Or a more updated take on it that I just started reading: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2013.11.5.490 The B.S. Octopus, another article I just stumbled on: https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/140/

From the very same jackass that wrote: "Proof Global Warming Is Asinine" [1] .. Next conspiracy theory... 1. https://wmbriggs.com/post/26131/

Earlier today, a post linking to this article vanished: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/. It was generating upvotes and discussion.

This reminds me of the story summed up in this quote: There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one. Good enough source here: http://wmbriggs.com/post/18291/ Humans form a very high-dimensional space. I'm not sure what to make of the point about orthogonality in that regard.

Look how low the murder rate is in the United States right now. It's half of what it was in the 70-90's. http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/

One of the co-authors has been writing about this extensively. http://wmbriggs.com/post/15337/

Here's a statistician's take on this story: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=9308

Malthus was right about what? He was wrong about nearly every single main hypothesis he made! What are you saying he got right? http://www.economist.com/node/11374623 http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1837 Have you actually read Malthus' works?

Briggs responds: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5154 My experience is that usually in a contentious debate like this, the person who can keep a cooler head is right. It's not a perfect heuristic but it's a good starting point. Galileo can afford to be calm whereas Cardinal Bellarmine has to rant and rave.

This is the kind of dishonest motte-and-bailey framing that is all too common in academia, that my post was trying to highlight. There are many aspects and fields of academia that are very obviously ideologically captured, whether that's "studies" in economics and sociology that are obvious attempts to reify the modern consensus of human beings as identical, fungible, latently-liberal economic units. Or it could be well-known physicists being taken to task about how their research on cosmological inflation contributes to the cause of diversity [0]. When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone. >A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite. You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves. [0] https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/39160/

No, I am not committing the gambler's fallacy. Though I can see why you might think that. There are enough things that sound similar. I'm instead talking about a more subtle detail. Which is that selecting a group based on performance results in selecting people in part for having been lucky. They were lucky to have done that well that time, were lucky to be in your group, and their future performance probably won't be as good. The result is called regression to the mean. See https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/34/1/215/638499 for an example of statisticians talking about it. See http://onlinestatbook.com/stat_sim/reg_to_mean/index.html for a more introductory tutorial. And see http://wmbriggs.com/post/63/ for an example of an article discussing this counterintuitive phenomena in the context of sports. (Namely the "Sports Illustrated curse" - the future performance of athletes whose performance was good enough to get them on the cover of Sports Illustrated drops after their article appears.)