Re: The Attack on Truth - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Attack-on-Truth-The-Chronicle-of-Higher-Education-tp7586189p7586201.html

Of course the really fun thing about statistics is the ongoing discussion about the "willful ignorance" of scientists submitting papers with technically correct but wholly dubious claims of statistical significance, because -- rather, becorrelate -- their salaries depend on getting published.  Funny that the language naturally inserts a causal claim into that observation, where I would rather put the cause on the system than the individuals, and I have to invent a word to back off 

I'm tending to see this issue theologically.  The technical name for "we're all imperfect and we've always been so" is original sin.  Feeling a bit of impostor syndrome?  That's how the personal experience of original sin manifests.  Disgusted that cops aren't fair, that rich people get privileges, that politicians repay rich people with more privileges, that FIFA is corrupt, that Australia outsources immigrant detention camps to Nauru, that Nauru denies visas to Australian civil rights lawyers seeking to defend immigrant rights, and so on?  Yeah, well, be disgusted, but try not to get too righteous about it and spare us the expressions of shocked outrage.  If you're shocked at this, then you haven't been paying attention.

So, are there any entirely good or entirely bad persons?  Or are they entirely figments of our imaginations?

-- rec --

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 10:10 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

Statistics is one tool.  I'm not sure it's the most powerful tool, though.  I tend to think the best tool is ... well, it goes by many names.  One name is "active listening" ... "empathy" ... etc.  The technique is well known to all of us (well unless we're autistic or psychopathic).  When you hear someone say something that just sounds wrong, there are 2 basic steps:

1) find out why you think they're wrong (including the statistics that surround any of the facts involved), and
2) try to figure out what the speaker _really_ means by whatever nonsense they're spouting.

Since I don't believe our thoughts are very accurate at all, I have no problems empathizing with someone who spouts (apparent) nonsense.  I do it myself on a regular basis.  I try not to.  But it's difficult.  In fact, the reason I find purposeful nonsense (including climate denial or chemtrails, but more like chatbots) so cool is because of the accidental nonsense in which we bathe.



On 06/09/2015 08:36 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
> Righto. So what we do is put a measure on "how much confidence" we have. Statistics gives us some tools for that - namely the "moment functionals" (mean, variance, skewness, etc.); and information theory gives us some more general tools for that - entropy and the other entropic funtionals. So maybe it's a mixture of the relative and the absolute. Maybe we've moved up to the "junior" level?
>
> Grant
>
> On 6/9/15 9:14 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Correct.  Nothing is certain.  We've known that since Kant.  NOW what?  That
>> there are no certain facts does not imply that some facts are not more
>> enduring and useful than others.  We need to get beyond the sophomoric
>> revelation that "everything is relative."

--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
Float away from those horizons

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