The data is what it is. The conclusions however, are in the opinion space. I don't have a problem with the facts, its the interpretation which concerns me.
Obviously, I hold a partisan view. I don't believe in some morally neutral vantage point to view this activity, It simply doesn't exist and there are many potential false moral equivalences in that anyway. Social policy in medicine and vaccination is not a neutral point, its objectively "sided" -you either agree or disagree. My reading of this website is they want to disagree, and somehow project "and its justified" from the data.
That "from the data" is where I start to have problems. Data is always coloured and nuanced. I would expect the CDC and others to be drawing opposite conclusions from the same underlying information model.
I would prefer this to be understood to be an equally partisan, opposed view website. It may be trying to claim some higher neutral point objective view outcome, but net overall its not.
In college, I had a pretty based statistics professor who said: "a skilled statistician can make the data tell whatever story his employers want". I chose not to pursue statistics as a career after that.
Its one of those debatable stories. I have a very good penguin book called "how to lie with statistics" which is obviously not trying to teach that, its using perverse sarcasm to explain how people do mislead. Things like charts which don't start at zero and magnify the 1% variances between samples into apparently (visually) far bigger things.
On the whole, why we start and stop things is complicated. I chose not to pursue engineer status, after the computer science ethics class discuss the risk side of getting it wrong (therac case, the freeman-fox computation disaster which led to two box-girder bridge collapses, Mismanaged expert systems REI-ifying racial and sexist admissions policy to medical degrees) -But in truth, I was probably unsuited. Its easier to say this was my watershed moment, but there were many reasons including lazyness.
Maybe you were better suited to a life in statistics than you thought?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 12.6 ms ] threadObviously, I hold a partisan view. I don't believe in some morally neutral vantage point to view this activity, It simply doesn't exist and there are many potential false moral equivalences in that anyway. Social policy in medicine and vaccination is not a neutral point, its objectively "sided" -you either agree or disagree. My reading of this website is they want to disagree, and somehow project "and its justified" from the data.
That "from the data" is where I start to have problems. Data is always coloured and nuanced. I would expect the CDC and others to be drawing opposite conclusions from the same underlying information model.
I would prefer this to be understood to be an equally partisan, opposed view website. It may be trying to claim some higher neutral point objective view outcome, but net overall its not.
On the whole, why we start and stop things is complicated. I chose not to pursue engineer status, after the computer science ethics class discuss the risk side of getting it wrong (therac case, the freeman-fox computation disaster which led to two box-girder bridge collapses, Mismanaged expert systems REI-ifying racial and sexist admissions policy to medical degrees) -But in truth, I was probably unsuited. Its easier to say this was my watershed moment, but there were many reasons including lazyness.
Maybe you were better suited to a life in statistics than you thought?