People are so caught up in color that it is getting ridiculous. Observing events in terms of numeric accuracy does not make a person an IST or PHOBE in any manner whatsoever.
Yes, it's amazing, the nonsensical arguments that people walk around parroting. Perhaps you have seen the documentary The Thirteenth? About the "prison industrial complex." The assertion is that black men are just randomly filling prisons because they are black. At the time, many colleagues and other constituents praised this documentary. I was looking around the room like, WHAT?????? Are you SERIOUS?????
Just randomly thrown into prison for no reason other than being black. You seriously believe that?
Of course it's even worse that the film was made with this silly assertion in the first place...but clearly a certain faction of the population nods along with these fallacies so that they can appear caring and good, when in fact they're just enabling very dumb beliefs that don't help the people they "care" about.
Applying logic to any discussion of current events or controversy these days is impossible. Thanks for a breakdown of why and when this happened in our education system — makes perfect sense. The question remains, how do we ever get logical debate back into the nation’s bloodstream? I’m skeptical it can ever happen.
"[P]attern recognition is about noticing structure in data, while statistics is about proving whether that structure is real or just noise."
Over the course of nearly 30 years in measuring results with evidence, my 'data consumers' have evolved from critical nitpickers parsing tables, some thinking my job is something they could never do, to dullards demanding colorful infographics with narrative handwaving, misdirection, & cheerleading, most thinking (out loud) that me trying to get the numbers right is kinda dumb, not to mention extremely annoying since I rather insist they need to understand the numbers.
One other angle (which was a gigantic focus back in my grad school days) is the assumptions of basic statistical reasoning, fundamental to valid & reliable inference with basic stats, e.g. normal distributions. (Maximum likelihood was becoming hip in the social sciences, and bimodal, poisson, gaussian, skewed, truncated distributions, among other things, were hot topics for research and criticism, and we tore everything apart on violating assumptions; it was a blood sport.) Now stats packages bake many non-normal distributions into 'options' and too much instruction seems to be teaching packages instead of developing the critical thinking needed when considering or understanding the 'shape' of your real population, or sample, or anything else. None of that apparently matters now - what counts is sounding sciencey and bamboozling people with fake math using packages doing magic the 'programmer' (point-and-clicker) doesn't understand. When the 'rationalistas' took over, for instance, the seemingly-blindingly obvious point that randomized controlled trials must be, to keep it simple, randomized and controlled, went out the window completely.
One of my subordinates cannot do anything except mine data without theory or understanding. (He has a data! science! masters degree.) After four years, he has finally gotten a little bit curious about the gigantic, rich, but error-plagued dataset we have at our fingertips, but soon there will be no one in his environment to keep encouraging him. Another newer subordinate demands respect for quantifying qualitative data from small purposive samples despite a year's worth of examples that the organization will put the results out into the world without caveats in order to misrepresent as 'evidence' claims that go far beyond what any of our data support. A gatekeeper over literally hundreds of millions of dollars of funding insists a real-world multi-year evaluation design must explain how it will "measure" the counterfactual. I routinely have to explain denominators, not only how a moving denominator in a "live" metric affects values but even which number is the denominator, and the difference between a percentage and a ratio and a rate.
A corrective is needed, beyond noticing that bridges built by people taught that math and logic are white supremacy, in the real world, collapse.
A day or two later my wife and I were at the social security office Iin downtown Berkeley
There was a middle aged black woman talking out loud to no one in particular
My first thought was that she might be disturbed>
She seemed to be addressing the 4 or 5 of us who had arrived before opening, to be at the head of the line (I was Numero uno)
I avoided eye contact and said nothing
After a while, in regards to aspects of contemporary society,
She said, "I can't believe it!"
So, at that point, I made eye contact and said,
You'd better believe it. It's true!
One or 2 sentences later, she asked me: "Are you a veteran"?
I said, Yes I am. What made you ask me that?
So, we had a rambling conversation that went on for 10 minutes or so.
She was OK.
Homeless and lonely, I'm sure
But she wasn't inebriated
and she told me her father was a career marine.
and her dad and mom were together for 60 years
good people, all the way.
So, my takeaway is
I really don't want to FK with crazy people who are filled with rage.
I don't care what someone looks like.
I don't care what clothes they wear or what car they drive.
I really appreciate people who are civil and reasonably courteous
whose body language can be ready.
They're out there, and every now and then, they pop up their heads and make my life better, if only for a few minutes.
Once again, you taught me to distinguish between statistics and patterns. That's was great and I appreciate the lesson. I decided to call them "stats and pats". Hope that gives you a chuckle.
There's probably more, but I would imagine you get my drift.
Our education system confines people and is extremely narrow in what students are exposed to. Same with our culture, dominant media and other institutions taken over by the left or Marxists. Instead of exposure to different POVs, and knowledge and appreciation of US and world history, people are exposed to the subjective and abridged Cliff Notes version -- continual indoctrination and policing of what's allowed to be viewed, seen and said. Forget creativity, innovation, logic or pattern recognition. The creation and nurturing of non-thinking people result in sheep who can't see past their own noses and yet have inflated views of their own intelligence and reasoning.
Well, now the Democrats will have to publicly forward their argument to the American people beginning this week. They will make fools of themselves, of course, and this will serve the President’s objective to have fair elections. Bring it on, Democrats. Go full blast.
You make some great points. We need T-shirts and bumper stickers that say: “Facts over feelings.” One things we have noticed in NC is that people charged with crimes are being entered into databases and labeled as “White” even though they are clearly Hispanic, or in some cases possibly mixed race, but have dominate non-White characteristics.
This has been pointed out in other large cities back when there were still journalists! The Baltimore Sun even showed multiple mug shots of criminals listed as “White” or “unknown race” that were obviously dark black! Seems like a concerted effort to skew the statistics!
The whole Covid debacle including the vaccine was about failing to acknowledge the statistics. We still are struggling to understand how to interpret all the pandemic statistics. 💉
Sorry, but the problem is they aren’t patterns. Just because something happens more than once does not make it a pattern. Also, socalled patterns can be unintentional.
The difference with white supremacy is that it is not just a pattern but an intentional system of oppression, suppression and inequality. The system of racism was set up through our legal system after Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1600s as a divide and conquer strategy of white elites to separate the interests of white and Black laborers. Everything since then has intended to maintain that division.
Because the academy is corrupt, through and through. The "best academics and scholars" in today's institutions of higher learning are, like you, agenda-driven, not truth-seekers. It is much better to be the latter than the former, no matter how "noble" the causes given as reasons for their lies, biases, and deliberate embellishments and elisions.
The truth shall set you free. Pursue it at all costs, all your life; you'll be well-rewarded for doing so.
Yes, it's amazing, the nonsensical arguments that people walk around parroting. Perhaps you have seen the documentary The Thirteenth? About the "prison industrial complex." The assertion is that black men are just randomly filling prisons because they are black. At the time, many colleagues and other constituents praised this documentary. I was looking around the room like, WHAT?????? Are you SERIOUS?????
Just randomly thrown into prison for no reason other than being black. You seriously believe that?
Of course it's even worse that the film was made with this silly assertion in the first place...but clearly a certain faction of the population nods along with these fallacies so that they can appear caring and good, when in fact they're just enabling very dumb beliefs that don't help the people they "care" about.
Applying logic to any discussion of current events or controversy these days is impossible. Thanks for a breakdown of why and when this happened in our education system — makes perfect sense. The question remains, how do we ever get logical debate back into the nation’s bloodstream? I’m skeptical it can ever happen.
Don't see how it can be done without upending the current educational system.
Truth/Facts are Kryptonite to some people, the pattern I see is they are often Liberals/Democrats
"[P]attern recognition is about noticing structure in data, while statistics is about proving whether that structure is real or just noise."
Over the course of nearly 30 years in measuring results with evidence, my 'data consumers' have evolved from critical nitpickers parsing tables, some thinking my job is something they could never do, to dullards demanding colorful infographics with narrative handwaving, misdirection, & cheerleading, most thinking (out loud) that me trying to get the numbers right is kinda dumb, not to mention extremely annoying since I rather insist they need to understand the numbers.
One other angle (which was a gigantic focus back in my grad school days) is the assumptions of basic statistical reasoning, fundamental to valid & reliable inference with basic stats, e.g. normal distributions. (Maximum likelihood was becoming hip in the social sciences, and bimodal, poisson, gaussian, skewed, truncated distributions, among other things, were hot topics for research and criticism, and we tore everything apart on violating assumptions; it was a blood sport.) Now stats packages bake many non-normal distributions into 'options' and too much instruction seems to be teaching packages instead of developing the critical thinking needed when considering or understanding the 'shape' of your real population, or sample, or anything else. None of that apparently matters now - what counts is sounding sciencey and bamboozling people with fake math using packages doing magic the 'programmer' (point-and-clicker) doesn't understand. When the 'rationalistas' took over, for instance, the seemingly-blindingly obvious point that randomized controlled trials must be, to keep it simple, randomized and controlled, went out the window completely.
One of my subordinates cannot do anything except mine data without theory or understanding. (He has a data! science! masters degree.) After four years, he has finally gotten a little bit curious about the gigantic, rich, but error-plagued dataset we have at our fingertips, but soon there will be no one in his environment to keep encouraging him. Another newer subordinate demands respect for quantifying qualitative data from small purposive samples despite a year's worth of examples that the organization will put the results out into the world without caveats in order to misrepresent as 'evidence' claims that go far beyond what any of our data support. A gatekeeper over literally hundreds of millions of dollars of funding insists a real-world multi-year evaluation design must explain how it will "measure" the counterfactual. I routinely have to explain denominators, not only how a moving denominator in a "live" metric affects values but even which number is the denominator, and the difference between a percentage and a ratio and a rate.
A corrective is needed, beyond noticing that bridges built by people taught that math and logic are white supremacy, in the real world, collapse.
This my friend is frightening. But I see the same, even in my PhD level students. Logic is rarely considered enem in the simplist analysis.
Thanks so much. You educated me and entertained me both at the same time.
Just getting stuff off my chest.
it seems that you're equally or more disturbed
by someone who reduces every solution
to every problem
down to:
all whites must pony up their $$
to provide a six or 7 figure amount
to every black
than
by some Yahoo
who says that all criminality
stems from people
with black skin.
The other day,
at the VA outpatient clinic in
downtown Oakland
I was reminded
that people who have an actual "life"
generally are pleasant
radiating positivity and cordiality>
I got into a conversation with an HVAC contractor
who was there to do some work
and we talked HVAC work
going back to before his time
up to the present.
He was relaxed talking to me
and vice versa
so as I said:
"people who have an actual "life"
generally are pleasant
radiating positivity and cordiality".
I was genuinely happy for him
that he has a good life
and I'm sure that he put in the effort
starting from the bottom
just as I did
and is working hard and struggling
to make his life as he can.
Case 2:
A day or two later my wife and I were at the social security office Iin downtown Berkeley
There was a middle aged black woman talking out loud to no one in particular
My first thought was that she might be disturbed>
She seemed to be addressing the 4 or 5 of us who had arrived before opening, to be at the head of the line (I was Numero uno)
I avoided eye contact and said nothing
After a while, in regards to aspects of contemporary society,
She said, "I can't believe it!"
So, at that point, I made eye contact and said,
You'd better believe it. It's true!
One or 2 sentences later, she asked me: "Are you a veteran"?
I said, Yes I am. What made you ask me that?
So, we had a rambling conversation that went on for 10 minutes or so.
She was OK.
Homeless and lonely, I'm sure
But she wasn't inebriated
and she told me her father was a career marine.
and her dad and mom were together for 60 years
good people, all the way.
So, my takeaway is
I really don't want to FK with crazy people who are filled with rage.
I don't care what someone looks like.
I don't care what clothes they wear or what car they drive.
I really appreciate people who are civil and reasonably courteous
whose body language can be ready.
They're out there, and every now and then, they pop up their heads and make my life better, if only for a few minutes.
Once again, you taught me to distinguish between statistics and patterns. That's was great and I appreciate the lesson. I decided to call them "stats and pats". Hope that gives you a chuckle.
There's probably more, but I would imagine you get my drift.
Our education system confines people and is extremely narrow in what students are exposed to. Same with our culture, dominant media and other institutions taken over by the left or Marxists. Instead of exposure to different POVs, and knowledge and appreciation of US and world history, people are exposed to the subjective and abridged Cliff Notes version -- continual indoctrination and policing of what's allowed to be viewed, seen and said. Forget creativity, innovation, logic or pattern recognition. The creation and nurturing of non-thinking people result in sheep who can't see past their own noses and yet have inflated views of their own intelligence and reasoning.
It's more like training or inculcation than education.
Average degenerates and logic.
Like oil and water.
And how they love to showcase their shortcomings on social media.
Thank God for the long form essay.
Well, now the Democrats will have to publicly forward their argument to the American people beginning this week. They will make fools of themselves, of course, and this will serve the President’s objective to have fair elections. Bring it on, Democrats. Go full blast.
As they always do.
You make some great points. We need T-shirts and bumper stickers that say: “Facts over feelings.” One things we have noticed in NC is that people charged with crimes are being entered into databases and labeled as “White” even though they are clearly Hispanic, or in some cases possibly mixed race, but have dominate non-White characteristics.
This has been pointed out in other large cities back when there were still journalists! The Baltimore Sun even showed multiple mug shots of criminals listed as “White” or “unknown race” that were obviously dark black! Seems like a concerted effort to skew the statistics!
Lies is all they have. For them it is the narrative, not the truth that is of value.
At this rate folk will not be able to spell the word fact, will turn into an emoji or something.
The whole Covid debacle including the vaccine was about failing to acknowledge the statistics. We still are struggling to understand how to interpret all the pandemic statistics. 💉
Facts
Just the facts ma’am. ☺️
Excellent piece. Thanks for taking the time to produce and publish it.
Hat tip.
Sorry, but the problem is they aren’t patterns. Just because something happens more than once does not make it a pattern. Also, socalled patterns can be unintentional.
The difference with white supremacy is that it is not just a pattern but an intentional system of oppression, suppression and inequality. The system of racism was set up through our legal system after Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1600s as a divide and conquer strategy of white elites to separate the interests of white and Black laborers. Everything since then has intended to maintain that division.
You've got some reading to do. I suggest a different set of authors.
Why would I diverge from reading the best academics and scholars?
Because the academy is corrupt, through and through. The "best academics and scholars" in today's institutions of higher learning are, like you, agenda-driven, not truth-seekers. It is much better to be the latter than the former, no matter how "noble" the causes given as reasons for their lies, biases, and deliberate embellishments and elisions.
The truth shall set you free. Pursue it at all costs, all your life; you'll be well-rewarded for doing so.
Umm. No.