I believe it was Nick Land who described cities as “IQ shredders”; they attract high intelligence people from rural areas and then immediately tank their birth rate.
Yes, this is why Asians and Whites are the dumbest races. They had traditions of religious celibacy, which while not always honored, caused lower birthrates among the intelligent, whereas Africa, the New World, and the Middle East did not.
Joke explainer: That was sarcastic, but the point is anyone can make up a plausible just so story about anything by picking some factoids to support their prejudices.
So if you were being sarcastic about Asians and Whites being the dumbest races... are they the smartest? Seems a little racist. Please make use of the edit button.
Yes, just to be explicit: there are no meaningful genetic differences in intelligence among human "races" (which is not a meaningful genetic group anyway).
Your joke doesn't really get to the point - do you think religious celibacy is as significant of a demographic factor as urbanization? Urbanization affects over half of the population.
For much of human history cities had disease rates so high that they were below replacement rate even in the pre-contraception era. It remains the case that that's where the art and culture happens, because the synergistic benefits of bringing like minded people together make them far more effective at producing culture than isolated farmers.
Yes, P(correlation ∩ causation) = 1 would be textually written as "It is almost certain that correlation and causation occur together". Or to bring you closer to the example, you could say P(causation | correlation) = 1 to say "It is almost certain that causation exists if correlation exists".
You can alter the right-hand side, but then you have to stop saying 'almost certain' because everyone assumes that means a measure one set.
So, for instance, you might believe that P(causation | correlation) = 0.8 across all human chosen distributions. You might well be right since adversarial distributions are so rarely chosen, i.e. there is a meta-effect where humans are choosing interesting queries in the first place.
It just pisses me off sometimes. How can a community of people be so aligned with my interests, and yet they are the most unpleasant, unfunny, stuck up people on the planet?
Everyone in this community is used to being the smartest person in the room, and it shows. No one ever assumes good faith on the part of other posters. No one ever actually tries to understand the other point of view. No one even understands what they themselves are saying. This is an echo chamber of the most egoistic people on the planet, and that's why I browse HN. It's like some kind of massive terrarium for the socially doomed.
Even your comment is offensive, with the passive aggressive "Let's not do X," as if we're part of some kind of collective, or I'm some kind of child that needs to be gently chided for my remark.
You don't know me. I don't know you. Where does this holier-than-thou attitude come from?
The amount of opinion spewed as fact in your rant is impressive. Which makes it even more entertaining when you compare it against the point you're trying to make.
Literally your 2nd-to-last comment before this was "What a tedious and unpleasant person". I'm not trying to "gotcha" here, and I'm sure the parent post to that was unpleasant and tedious, but I am hoping you'll consider that you might be doing some of the same thing you're upset about others doing. Describing anyone as "the socially doomed" to me indicates an attachment to the idea of mainstream social mores as "right". The most socially awkward people I know also happen to have the most friends.
fwiw, the trick I've found for enjoying hn comments is to ignore the pedantic, argumentative ones, and find the nuggets of joy and wisdom. Not saying I always manage to do that either, but... that's the only time I enjoy reading the comments.
I think everything you're saying is a reasonable interpretation of the behavior you observe, but I don't think it's the only possible nor the only plausible explanation, so it might be worth diving into what assumptions you might be making, especially considering that you're aware of what I think is one of the core issues - we don't know each other.
Text is hard to see through sometimes, and language is often vague. It's not always obvious when something is a joke, and it's not always guaranteed that something said in jest will be received the same way, nor that it's actually funny. Also downvotes are given for a wide variety of reasons (same as upvotes) so downvotes don't even necessarily indicate that a joke was interpreted as unfunny- it might simply be detracting or not relevant. It's best to not take downvotes personally, because they're often not given for the reasons you assume. (BTW I see good jokes on HN getting upvotes all the time, so make sure to avoid jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information.)
> Even your comment is offensive, with the passive aggressive "Let's not do X," as if we're part of some kind of collective, or I'm some kind of child that needs to be gently chided for my remark.
Sorry to say so, but this is off the mark. Your comment is explicitly offensive toward people who are actually autistic. This is a sort of collective, it is a community of hackers, and gentle encouragement to keep things civil and in line with the guidelines is allowed and encouraged. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How can a community of people be so aligned with my interests, and yet they are the most unpleasant, unfunny, stuck up people on the planet?
There are other places on the internet where intelligent, articulate people gather to exchange wisdom and the occasional burst of cleverness or humor is appreciated. For reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, HN isn't it.
You are the one who is judging others. There is just an (implicit) rule that there are better places for humor than here and that it's better in the long run for everybody to keep discussions on topic. So yes, as for every other rules, it's sometimes annoying but there is no reason to be so upset about this.
>Everyone who is downvoting this comment has incurable autism.
Humorless and unpleasant are subjective. Not everyone is going to like your humor. Doubly so if you’re going, not just for an insult, but an edgy insult. Personally I think your comment is a shitty joke that comes off as an offensive version of holier than thou for your enlightened sense of humor.
I think you’re longer response is an uncannily apt description of itself.
After pondering it for years, I believe there are deep reasons why people arrive at anthropomorphized images of the community like this. We generalize based on what makes the strongest impression on us, and unfortunately what we dislike tends to make stronger impressions than what we feel good or neutral about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The community that you think you're encountering is thus an afterimage of things you noticed and disliked because those burn more into the retina. (I don't mean 'you' personally; this is common.) It's your own creation, in the sense that the selection of inputs is determined by your own pre-existing opinions and feelings. This is how we end up feeling surrounded by demons in a place like this, when in reality it is just a large and diffuse population sample: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... People with different (let's call it) pre-existing conditions notice different things, make different generalizations, and construct different images.
The reason it gets so emotional is that our relationships with other people are the most intensely emotional part of our lives, and a large and diffuse set of social inputs provides all the data points one could possibly need to select from.
A lot of people experience HN painfully in this way. That's a pity, and I feel bad about it; I think the solution is for the community to get more accurate reflection about the dynamics that lead to these impressions. If enough people become aware of them, maybe the needle will shift some. I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. In that case the context was about people feeling surrounded by social/political enemies rather than by unpleasant/stuck-up people, but the underlying dynamic seems the same.
Hello. I'm a recruiter for a stealth startup with prominent venture capital backing. Its public name is Reset. We're seeking specifically minded individuals to populate an artificially selected breakaway society. Our society bears itself on a rational religion of individualism, stability, heritage, and an immutable interface to the collective.
Time is fleeting. For next steps, email founders@reset.gov
This matching one of the original claims in the "How to Lie with Statistics" book (1954).
Storks like roosting on chimney pots and larger houses have more chimneys and more children.
On the other side of the thought process, if you are interested in ways to completely ignore p-values, multivariate stats is a good candidate, and is rather pedagogically well suited, too.
For example, if you have a friend who hates chi-squared tests, instead teach them correspondence analysis.
A year later you can tell them they already know how to do a chi-squared test. To be fair, this latter comment depends a bit on how the library is implemented, and possibly it only does correspondence analysis while not giving you direct access to a way to generate p-values. Some libraries will have a function that you can call that runs simulations and then provides the p-values.
Many of these statistical techniques are an obligation only if you have to sample from a space and you have to somehow determine whether the sample is representative. If you presuppose that your sample is representative, then you move into a parallel world of statistics. An example would be a thermometer. If you sample it at 10:00 00 and again at 10:00 01, certainly you would expect both to be the same? If it's not the same or a close value I would rather say that the thermometer is broken, not that your within group variation for the minute 10:00 is high...
Brady Haran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran). I Like to believe he's somewhat of a low-key internet celebrity with a slew of YouTube channels and a successful podcast. All-round top bloke, too.
I don't understand why everyone calls the correlation between the number of storks and childbirths per country as "spurious". That's incorrect. There is absolutely a correlation, but it is the statement that the fabricated cause of that correlation as presented (i.e. storms deliver babies) is true that is spurious. The truth underpinning the correlation (i.e. increased country size tends to yield increased populations of flora/fauna of all varieties) requires additional data to reveal - especially, in this case, if your a person who has never heard of a "stork" or what one is.
The p-value tells researchers that there's something interesting going on between data sets and further exploration is likely warranted to reveal the true underlying relationship. It's not a proof of a fabricated conclusion. "The golden way to test a causal relation is an appropriately designed experiment, where only the suspected "cause" is varied and the "effect" is observed."
Another great study: "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials" BMJ 2003; 327 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459
---
Abstract
Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.
Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
“We publish a special two-week issue of The BMJ over Christmas and New Year. We are pleased to consider all kinds of articles, including reports of original research, for this issue.
The soul of the Christmas issue is originality. We don’t want to publish anything that resembles anything we’ve published before. While we welcome light-hearted fare and satire, we do not publish spoofs, hoaxes, or fabricated studies.”
Does researchgate provide any service other than showing up first in searches for papers then obfuscating the real source of papers and making me prove I'm human every time by clicking on pictures of motorcycles or cars or buses everytime I accidentally click on one of their links?
Yeah, but it usually seems to rank ahead of the journal website and/or arXiv or iNSPIREHEP when I search for papers. And always makes me solve the captcha...
It is funny (and upsetting) how this is on the HackerNews frontpage, and yet this [0] is also sitting on the frontpage with currently double the upvotes. The study in question observes some correlation and then nonchalantly declares a causation (see title).
65 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threada) there are more storks in rural areas
b) people who live in rural areas tend to have more children.
Joke explainer: That was sarcastic, but the point is anyone can make up a plausible just so story about anything by picking some factoids to support their prejudices.
They almost certainly meant there is no difference rather than it being the true opposite.
Yep, looks like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701129
The neoreactionary perspective is just oozing from that post, too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can alter the right-hand side, but then you have to stop saying 'almost certain' because everyone assumes that means a measure one set.
So, for instance, you might believe that P(causation | correlation) = 0.8 across all human chosen distributions. You might well be right since adversarial distributions are so rarely chosen, i.e. there is a meta-effect where humans are choosing interesting queries in the first place.
This article studies the number of storks in a country overall.
So it's not really related. I'd say total storks in a country and total births in a country are more related to the size of the country.
There's no evidence that storks deliver babies vs storks being born alongside babies, or babies creating storks, or that storks impregnate mothers.
Everyone in this community is used to being the smartest person in the room, and it shows. No one ever assumes good faith on the part of other posters. No one ever actually tries to understand the other point of view. No one even understands what they themselves are saying. This is an echo chamber of the most egoistic people on the planet, and that's why I browse HN. It's like some kind of massive terrarium for the socially doomed.
Even your comment is offensive, with the passive aggressive "Let's not do X," as if we're part of some kind of collective, or I'm some kind of child that needs to be gently chided for my remark.
You don't know me. I don't know you. Where does this holier-than-thou attitude come from?
> Where does this holier-than-thou attitude come from?
I don't think it's just whomever "they" is...
fwiw, the trick I've found for enjoying hn comments is to ignore the pedantic, argumentative ones, and find the nuggets of joy and wisdom. Not saying I always manage to do that either, but... that's the only time I enjoy reading the comments.
Text is hard to see through sometimes, and language is often vague. It's not always obvious when something is a joke, and it's not always guaranteed that something said in jest will be received the same way, nor that it's actually funny. Also downvotes are given for a wide variety of reasons (same as upvotes) so downvotes don't even necessarily indicate that a joke was interpreted as unfunny- it might simply be detracting or not relevant. It's best to not take downvotes personally, because they're often not given for the reasons you assume. (BTW I see good jokes on HN getting upvotes all the time, so make sure to avoid jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information.)
> Even your comment is offensive, with the passive aggressive "Let's not do X," as if we're part of some kind of collective, or I'm some kind of child that needs to be gently chided for my remark.
Sorry to say so, but this is off the mark. Your comment is explicitly offensive toward people who are actually autistic. This is a sort of collective, it is a community of hackers, and gentle encouragement to keep things civil and in line with the guidelines is allowed and encouraged. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I think it's also a good and underappreciated point you make.
> Where does this holier-than-thou attitude come from?
Do you mean that literally?
There are other places on the internet where intelligent, articulate people gather to exchange wisdom and the occasional burst of cleverness or humor is appreciated. For reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, HN isn't it.
Humorless and unpleasant are subjective. Not everyone is going to like your humor. Doubly so if you’re going, not just for an insult, but an edgy insult. Personally I think your comment is a shitty joke that comes off as an offensive version of holier than thou for your enlightened sense of humor.
I think you’re longer response is an uncannily apt description of itself.
After pondering it for years, I believe there are deep reasons why people arrive at anthropomorphized images of the community like this. We generalize based on what makes the strongest impression on us, and unfortunately what we dislike tends to make stronger impressions than what we feel good or neutral about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The community that you think you're encountering is thus an afterimage of things you noticed and disliked because those burn more into the retina. (I don't mean 'you' personally; this is common.) It's your own creation, in the sense that the selection of inputs is determined by your own pre-existing opinions and feelings. This is how we end up feeling surrounded by demons in a place like this, when in reality it is just a large and diffuse population sample: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... People with different (let's call it) pre-existing conditions notice different things, make different generalizations, and construct different images.
The reason it gets so emotional is that our relationships with other people are the most intensely emotional part of our lives, and a large and diffuse set of social inputs provides all the data points one could possibly need to select from.
A lot of people experience HN painfully in this way. That's a pity, and I feel bad about it; I think the solution is for the community to get more accurate reflection about the dynamics that lead to these impressions. If enough people become aware of them, maybe the needle will shift some. I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. In that case the context was about people feeling surrounded by social/political enemies rather than by unpleasant/stuck-up people, but the underlying dynamic seems the same.
Time is fleeting. For next steps, email founders@reset.gov
For example, if you have a friend who hates chi-squared tests, instead teach them correspondence analysis.
A year later you can tell them they already know how to do a chi-squared test. To be fair, this latter comment depends a bit on how the library is implemented, and possibly it only does correspondence analysis while not giving you direct access to a way to generate p-values. Some libraries will have a function that you can call that runs simulations and then provides the p-values.
Many of these statistical techniques are an obligation only if you have to sample from a space and you have to somehow determine whether the sample is representative. If you presuppose that your sample is representative, then you move into a parallel world of statistics. An example would be a thermometer. If you sample it at 10:00 00 and again at 10:00 01, certainly you would expect both to be the same? If it's not the same or a close value I would rather say that the thermometer is broken, not that your within group variation for the minute 10:00 is high...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-d1ApBTFw
There's also the amusing Spurious Correlations site with several examples of convincing looking correlations
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
The p-value tells researchers that there's something interesting going on between data sets and further exploration is likely warranted to reveal the true underlying relationship. It's not a proof of a fabricated conclusion. "The golden way to test a causal relation is an appropriately designed experiment, where only the suspected "cause" is varied and the "effect" is observed."
1. https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_correlation_doesnt_impl...
---
Abstract
Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.
Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
“We publish a special two-week issue of The BMJ over Christmas and New Year. We are pleased to consider all kinds of articles, including reports of original research, for this issue.
The soul of the Christmas issue is originality. We don’t want to publish anything that resembles anything we’ve published before. While we welcome light-hearted fare and satire, we do not publish spoofs, hoaxes, or fabricated studies.”
Examples of BMJ ‘Christmas’ articles at https://sciencemadeeasy.kinja.com/top-10-bmj-christmas-paper..., https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-best-of-the-br...
Does researchgate provide any service other than showing up first in searches for papers then obfuscating the real source of papers and making me prove I'm human every time by clicking on pictures of motorcycles or cars or buses everytime I accidentally click on one of their links?
Not too sure what to make of this...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24675256