Post your asides here

[mamselle]

^ Unrelated...

Thornton Wilder knew something we're forgetting.

M.

[polly_mer]

unrelated

I started the thread with that link.

I've posted more specific links to parts of that page as the discussion progressed.

That's a zero for doing the reading before posting.  Remember, the reading score is 15% of your final grade.

[polly_mer]

unrelated

So when it's your area of expertise being relevant as underinformed people repeating standard mass media talking points, your word of what's just unacceptable should be taken as law because the poster is just wrong.

When it's my area of expertise and you're the one repeating standard mass media talking points, you don't understand why the assertion that you're just wrong should be allowed to stand without an extensive case on why it's wrong using sources you accept that are the ones that experts won't use.

Interesting.  Is that the kind of inclusive, critical thinking you teach your students as part of mandatory liberal arts education?

[mahagonny]

Sometimes it's amazing how people will show up on a thread, post some lame put down with no substantive rebuttal or committing to a point of view, and think that is meaningful, just because they're part of a mob.

[aside]

[unrelated:]

Wow, I feel like I'm being sucked back toward the 1980s by a vortex of willful ignorance ...

[RatGuy]

Given your handle and the content of your posts, I can only conclude that you're absolutely terrible at your job.

[polly_mer]

Given your handle and the content of your posts, I can only conclude that you're absolutely terrible at your job.

Mom still loves me anyway.

[polly_mer]

As a public service since apparently college general education didn't cover it, this post is an overview on how to think about science in the public mass media.

As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you read something that is drastically at odds with all previous experience, then ask for more evidence.  The more outlandish the claim, the more evidence there should be.

For example, "Children, the known disease vectors for all kinds of respiratory viruses, don't get this particular virus and can't pass it along" is an extraordinary claim for anyone who has spent time with groups of children and got every cold that comes along.



The exact phrase "no evidence exists" covers two situations that are opposite in meaning so it's important to know the entire context.

The first meaning is the normal English usage equivalent to "We looked really, really hard.  We checked every possibility that we could dream up and then we contacted all our friends and colleagues.  Everyone working on this problem has exhausted everything we could manage and, despite prior expectations of how things work, there is no evidence that this particular thing works that way."

The second meaning is common in interim reports for new investigations and is equivalent to "We have no evidence because we haven't look at that aspect yet.  No conclusions should be drawn because we just don't know how that factor plays in this case."

The media is prone to pulling "no evidence exists" from a report and treating it always as "because we looked really, really hard" instead of "we are doing an interim report on what we do know".

The children and Covid-19 come to mind again.  The questions early on in scientific circles included:

* Did you actually test large numbers of children for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19)?

* Would children have had an opportunity to be infected since schools and most daycares closed so quickly and early?

* (later) Now that we know about asymptomatic spread and large numbers of adults test positive with minor/no symptoms, did you really test enough children when they were in good position to have been infected and many of them could have been asymptomatic or easily dismissed as having minor symptoms for some other reason?



A summary of a summary of a press release with the most strongly stated claim prominently displayed as a news headline is not scientific evidence of anything, regardless of how prestigious the outlet for the original article or the affiliation of the authors.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant gives a funny comic with the explanation on how statistics works in the case of "significant" in science meaning "low probability of random chance, but still possible it is random chance".  Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, especially when there's no plausible mechanism or the information out in the world is very sparse.

Common drawbacks to interim science reports include:

* small sample size. 
    Some of the current vaccine research is being done on fewer than 10 people as a first step.

* limited applicability outside the exact context 
    An early report on opening schools was a model that didn't even use any data from the current situation.  The scientists made an input assumption that transmission would be low in schools and the model returned the result that transmission in schools would be a minor factor.  That's one way to verify a model (i.e., does the model work under easily checked input conditions to give consistent outputs), but that's not the same as transmission actually being low.

    The in vitro (lab conditions that don't involve a live host), in vivo (lab conditions with a live host), and "out in the wild" (whatever would happen in normal life) are also contexts that matter.  "Everyone" laughed when President Trump asked about taking some in vitro results related to killing the virus and putting them into humans, but that same level of lack of awareness often makes the news headlines as "Scientists find X is important to killing the virus" where X is going to translate as well as injecting bleach into humans.


Identifying something as a primary factor is absolutely not the same as identifying something as an overwhelmingly, within rounding of sole, factor

Again, the reports in the mass media tend to pick a headline that is misleading and glosses all the details, if not actually being wrong.

An an accessible example,  I generally go to work in three ways:

* 50% of the time, I drive my own car.
* 40% of the time, I ride the bus.
* 10% of the time, I get a ride with a neighbor.

The primary way I get to work is driving my own car.  However, ignoring the times I ride the bus or get a ride with a neighbor is just silly if the question is "can I give you a ride home?"  The probability is about half that I won't have a car at work.

The current public health mantra is "stay home, wear a mask when out, stay away from people, wash your hands, don't touch your face, and sanitize high touch surfaces" because that is what we know about how viruses spread.  Any claims that this particular virus doesn't spread through high-touch surfaces when sick people are present is again an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.


Exact numbers are meaningless without the error bars/uncertainties on the inputs propagated to the outputs.

A typical gen ed lab course will cover the difference between precision and accuracy.

When we get to statistical science, even statistical physical science, we also have to think about uncertainty (and actual errors) in the inputs that will affect the outputs.  A good primer with general-public-accessible-explanations of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty is available to those who click on this sentence.

The short version is aleatory uncertainty is baked into the inputs themselves.  For example, the US has a wide range of humans and we can't just pick a "typical" human and be confident we got anything right.  The proper scientific thing to do is run a bunch of scenarios with various inputs (if modeling) or do many case studies with a wide variety of people to help ensure our input distribution will be about representative and thus our output distributions will cover most cases.  The results, then, may have a significant spread that is real and will not get better with more samples because the distribution is in the inputs.

Epistemic uncertainty means we just don't know all the inputs yet to good enough precision (and that's aside from any errors in measurement or modeling or interpretation of our measurements since often what you want to know is not the thing you can measure).  Especially early on in a new situation, we will have big error bars on the inputs, which should mean large error bars on the outputs.  Looking at images on the CDC webpage, one can see that some models (and modeling groups) put good-sized regions indicating their probable uncertainty.

Any report of results that has something pretty bland as an uncertainty or error bar like "plus or minus 10 percent" or "plus or minus <round number like 50 or 10000>" basically screams "we didn't do any kind of analysis on the uncertainties".


Government documents that are clearly interim reports done by literature review should not be given the same credibility as reports written by a panel of world experts in that exact field to address a specific question.

It's not rare for interns or temporary science folks in a government agency to be assigned to write an overview for a given purpose and be given just 6-8 weeks to do so.  That type of government document is probably good enough to give a snapshot of the current state of the literature, but should not be given the same authoritative scientific status as the results of a government report that has a ton of authors with their affiliations on the front pages.

Knowing the difference is a key part of being able to assess the credibility of the information.  Even with a blue-ribbon panel report, one wants to apply the context and drawbacks questions while reading instead of taking the bulleted list of summary points as the final word.


Summary

Critical thinking matters out in the world every bit as much as it matters in a general education classroom.  Selecting good primary sources (which is definitely not the news) is key to starting any discussion.  However, one must then do the compare and contrast among all the good primary sources as well as other knowledge bases before just blindly asserting any one sentence as true, regardless of the prestige of the outlet or the authors.  Arguing from authority can be legitimate, but only if you start from doing the real research instead of just the news or the first hit on Google that seems relevant.

[hungry_ghost]

If someone is observed to be angry, erratic, and unhappy and then commits suicide, can we all just say "RIP"?
Is the sh!t throwing (from both sides of the aisle) necessary?
What good does it do?
These are hard times, and there is so much unhappiness in this world.
Please, everyone, let's do what we can to make our world a better place, not an angrier one.

[AmLitHist]

Thank you, Hungry Ghost. The sentiment is applicable in many, many situations these days.

[downer]

Going to those threads is what I hear it's like to sit with your bitter uncle at Thanksgiving. Makes me glad I have no such uncle.

[mamselle]

I'm avoiding about 2/3 threads on my queue, just by seeing who the poster is.

I open the thread, don't scroll down to read it, and it goes out of my queue.

Makes for a peaceful life...

M.

[little bongo]

If someone is observed to be angry, erratic, and unhappy and then commits suicide, can we all just say "RIP"?
Is the sh!t throwing (from both sides of the aisle) necessary?
What good does it do?
These are hard times, and there is so much unhappiness in this world.
Please, everyone, let's do what we can to make our world a better place, not an angrier one.

It's truly lovely, but I'd just settle for making the fora a slightly better place.

However, I should note that there's a great deal of empathy and kindness in the mental health thread (as there was in the older work-life balance thread).

[tuxthepenguin]

That was so uninformed that I actually laughed out loud when I read it. I thought it was sarcasm to make a point. Then I realized you were serious. I'm happy the others ignored you so now I don't need to spend time on this thread.

[mahagonny]

'I usually ignore your posts. Then I select quotations from them any reply to them.'