MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Statistics’

Panic Pandemic – Why are people who should know better buying the Covid19 hype? – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on March 20, 2020

But what if from Day Two to Day Ten inclusive 198 more people get it and none of them die?

Well, according to the normal method of assessing CFR that would be 200 cases, one death, and a CFR of 0.5%

But with this brilliant new method, it would still be a CFR of 50% – because we are only allowed to count the cases who got sick on the same day as the fatality. And only two people got sick that day, of whom 50% died.

You see the corrupt genius of it?

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/16/panic-pandemic-why-are-people-who-should-know-better-buying-the-covid19-hype/

Catte Black

The only certainty about the ‘novel’ virus is that a great deal of nonsense is being talked about it by people who really ought to know better, and a great deal of opportunism is being displayed.

From Netanyahu grabbing the chance to postpone his corruption trial to Hollywood starlets claiming they have ‘tested positive’ (surely not a sad and cynical attempt to up their profile), this bandwagon is seething and teeming with those trying to seize their moment of fame or get rich or stay out of jail or just join in the mayhem

It’s cool to be nCoV-positive now. Maybe that’s why such inordinate numbers of famous people are staking their claim to it.

ISIS are apparently a bit worried about nCoV also and is allegedly sending out travel advisories to its jihadists.

Yup, that’s a real thing, right there. Really happening. Definitely.

Meanwhile, the propaganda is relentless, and there’s a variety for all tastes.

If you like your fear porn vanilla you can read all the articles based on total speculation that tell you millions will die if we don’t demand martial law and vaccines. (Speaking of vaccines, the as-yet-untested Covid19 vaccine is going to mandatory in Denmark, and in the US the manufacturers will have legal immunity should it cause any ill-effects).

If you are of a more sceptical turn of mind well, how about nCoV as bio-weapon? Plenty of juicy stuff on that topic also.

And scientists and science journals are not immune. There’s no shortage of people with PhDs willing to talk nonsense with a sciencey spin in order to convince the more inquiring proles that the governments are correct to invoke emergency powers and get that untested vaccine cranking out asap.

Look at this beauty. Written by a team of MDs and other ‘experts’ and appearing in The Lancet, it is about the most naked example I have seen to date of pseudoscience being used to inflate the perception of nCoV as something other than what it is.

The purpose of the article is apparently to find some sort of barely rational reason for estimating the nCoV case fatality rate to be higher than it actually is by a factor of ten.

Here’s the ‘reasoning’ it offers:

However, these mortality rate estimates are based on the number of deaths relative to the number of confirmed cases of infection, which is not representative of the actual death rate; patients who die on any given day were infected much earlier, and thus the denominator of the mortality rate should be the total number of patients infected at the same time as those who died.

They actually suggest with a straight face (though they don’t say why) that in order to get a ‘real’ figure for case fatality we need to count deaths as a percentage only of those who became infected at the same time as those who died.

So, if on Day One of a hypothetical new disease, two people get it and one dies, this would be a 50% case fatality ratio.

Sure, no problem. Common sense and statistics agree with that.

But what if from Day Two to Day Ten inclusive 198 more people get it and none of them die?

Well, according to the normal method of assessing CFR that would be 200 cases, one death, and a CFR of 0.5%

But with this brilliant new method, it would still be a CFR of 50% – because we are only allowed to count the cases who got sick on the same day as the fatality. And only two people got sick that day, of whom 50% died.

You see the corrupt genius of it? It’s a statistical nonsense that crucially gives permission to any would-be stats compilers in the WHO or elsewhere to overestimate the CFR of this bug, or indeed any other subsequent alleged ‘killer’ virus.

If you doubt this is the point, then read the article. This is just what the authors do, having the total gall to claim the ‘real’ CFR for nCoV is anywhere up to 20%, based solely on this crazy new way of figuring out the stats.

Which will look great in future headlines, and help pave the way for public acceptance of a total fascist dictatorship.

If you ever doubted that corruption is now endemic and all our institutions – political, legal, medical – are stacked with yes-men and jobsworths or fools prepared to put their names to any junk proclamation that might get them a raise or save their professional skins, just think of this article. Written by alleged world-class ‘experts’, published in the Lancet, and nothing more than a word salad of contradictory nonsense and meaningless conclusions designed to promote a political and propagandist point.

It even at one point acknowledges the probability of many many subclinical or symptom-free carriers of this supposed virus. But while the authors satisfy some dormant scrap of conscience by alluding to it they don’t draw their readers’ attention to the concomitant fact this lowers the case fatality by quite a way. In fact they allow themselves to sort of imply the opposite, because that is the level on which such people work:

Notably, the full denominator remains unknown because asymptomatic cases or patients with very mild symptoms might not be tested and will not be identified.

This is just one example of the forest of disinformative, hysterical, fog-bound garbage being poured on our heads about this so-called pandemic. That this is part of a coordinated and massive attempt to instil worldwide fear and enact worldwide population-management methods is now undeniable.

What is nCoV19? I honestly do not know.

The more the fear porn ramps up, the less certain I become of any aspect of the narrative surrounding it. We are definitely all being discouraged from questioning its virulence, discouraged from referring to its official fatality and case numbers, which do not correlate with the level of fear we are being told is appropriate. There is certainly a massive and multifaceted attempt to fudge and inflate those numbers to bring them in line with the ‘response’.

This brings us back to our revelation that good old Wikipedia have been downgrading the CFR of the Spanish Flu. It’s hard not to see this as part of the same process.

The actual death rates just aren’t high enough. So talk them up, play pea and thimble games with the stats, and do some Memory-Holing so that the 1918 pandemic suddenly has a very similar CFR, allowing your tame media to make all the right comparisons in their op eds and editorials, pointing out how many millions died back then despite it only having a fatality ratio of 2.5%.

They seem aware of the discrepancy, and are making efforts to prevent people researching it. The WHO are warning people not to read “too much” about the disease in order to protect their mental health. In a write up on the reccomendations, the BBC says this:

There is a lot of misinformation swirling around – stay informed by sticking to trusted sources of information such as government and NHS websites

Whether this virus is as imaginary as some are saying, or entirely real, it’s being hyped to a point beyond any connection with reality, and not just in the media. It’s a multi-pronged assault on our minds right now. Allegedly reliable and authoritative medical professionals are just as likely to talk propaganda at you as some government minister or media halfwit.

Even in the alt-media, many have stopped thinking and gone full deer-in-the-headlights, devoting their websites to recycling government talking points and urging those same governments to lock down their citizens.

How bizarre is it that outlets who were – just weeks ago – warning against trusting anything that comes out of the mouths of our ‘masters’, are now prepared to surrender entirely to official narratives and official ‘safe-keeping’ – and for a virus which, even if totally real, has killed about 7,000 people – or around 7% of the numbers who have died over the same time period – of the current flu.

Yes, that is a real statistic. Check it out.

And no, don’t tell me it’s “not a fair comparison” because the flu is ‘always’ here and nCoV is new. All you do by that is display your unthinking foolishness. Flu viruses are RNA viruses that mutate all the time – which is why you can catch ‘the flu’ over and over again; You’re catching a different strain, a ‘new’ variant. Just like nCoV it needs to travel by infection routes. And just like nCov it has to start small.

But unlike nCov it has already managed to kill around 100,000 people since Jan 1 this year. So let go of that particular piece of nonsense, ok?

Do the alt-media types backing these extreme quarantine and self-isolation notions think the anti-assembly laws, mandatory vaccines and other special powers will all just vanish once this crisis has subsided (because all pandemics eventually do go away)? Do they think the de facto martial law will be temporary?

Do they think we can just ask nice and everything will go back to the way it was? (assuming, of course, the entire system hasn’t morphed into the Hunger Games due to global financial meltdown and mass poverty, because we all basically signed off on closing down what remains of our economy.

Are they thinking at all, or just reacting?

The panic is now seeding itself and doing the propaganda work for those who set it off, and an obvious and very very alarming agenda is being rolled out right behind it.

It’s never been more important to stay alert, sceptical and objective. We’ll keep trying to do that – and you should all do the same.

Be seeing you

Fbi Report Ends Nra Nonsense About "good Guys With Guns" | Page 14 | US Message Board ...

 

 

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Using Statistics Means You’re ‘Silencing Women’s Voices’ – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 3, 2019

This kind of gobbledygook is actually taught in real-live universities.

This is what you get for your hundreds of thousands of debt.

Not good for US.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/thomas-woods/using-statistics-means-youre-silencing-womens-voices/

By

Tom Woods Show

From the Tom Woods Letter:

It turns out that feminists don’t like quantitative research — you know, the kind where you gather and assess objective data.

A fine gentleman in my private Facebook group brought to my attention a gem from a textbook called Social Research Methods.

Here are excerpts from the section called “Feminism and Quantitative Research,” followed by my commentary on each.

“Quantitative research suppresses the voices of women either by ignoring them or submerging them in a torrent of facts and statistics.”

My commentary: This is insane.

“The criteria of valid knowledge associated with quantitative research are ones that turn women, when they are the focus of research, into objects. This means that women are again subjected to exploitation, in that knowledge and experience are extracted from them with nothing in return.”

My commentary: This is insane.

“The emphasis on controlling variables exacerbates this last problem, and indeed the very idea of control is viewed as a masculine approach.”

My commentary: This is insane.

“The use of predetermined categories in quantitative research results in an emphasis on what is already known and consequently in ‘the silencing of women’s own voices.’”

My commentary: This is insane.

This kind of gobbledygook is actually taught in real-live universities.

My dashboard university, Liberty Classroom, on the other hand, is the opposite of this.

It is like a ten-megaton bomb to stuff like this.

Normal people teaching real history and economics. Zero leftist jargon. Takes a sledgehammer to political correctness. Cures educational malpractice.

See you there:

 

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Statistics: Destroyed From Within?

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2019

Unfortunately, the social sciences tend to follow the same law that the late Dr. Robert Mendelsohn has shown is adopted in medicine: never drop any procedure, no matter how faulty, until a better one is offered in its place.

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/08/statistics-destroyed-from-within.html#more

By Murray Rothbard

As improbable as this may seem now, I was at one time in college a statistics major. After taking all the undergraduate courses in statistics, I enrolled in a graduate course in mathematical statistics at Columbia with the eminent Harold Hotelling, one of the founders of modern mathematical economics. After listening to several lectures of Hotelling, I experienced an epiphany: the sudden realization that the entire “science” of statistical inference rests on one crucial assumption, and that that assumption is utterly groundless. I walked out of the Hotelling course, and out of the world of statistics, never to return.

Statistics, of course, is far more than the mere collection of data. Statistical inference is the conclusions one can draw from that data. In particular, since—apart from the decennial U.S.
census of population—we never know all the data, our conclusions must rest on very small samples drawn from the population. After taking our sample or samples, we have to find a way
to make statements about the population as a whole. For example, suppose we wish to conclude something about the average height of the American male population. Since there is no way
that we can mobilize every male American and measure everyone’s height, we take samples of a small number, say 500 people, selected in various ways, from which we presume to say what
the average American’s height may be.

In the science of statistics, the way we move from our known samples to the unknown population is to make one crucial assumption: that the samples will, in any and all cases, whether we are dealing with height or unemployment or who is going to vote for this or that candidate, be distributed around the population figure according to the so-called “normal curve.”

The normal curve is a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve familiar to all statistics textbooks. Because all samples are assumed to fall around the population figure according to this curve, the statistician feels justified in asserting, from his one or more limited samples, that the height of the American population, or the unemployment rate, or whatever, is definitely XYZ within a “confidence level” of 90 or 95 percent. In short, if, for example, a sample height for the average male is 5 feet 9 inches, 90 or 95 out of every 100 such samples will be within a certain definite range of 5 feet 9 inches. These precise figures are arrived at simply by assuming that all samples are distributed around the population according to this normal curve.

It is because of the properties of the normal curve, for example, that the election pollsters could assert, with overwhelming confidence, that Bush was favored by a certain percentage of voters, and Dukakis by another percentage, all within “three percentage points” or “five percentage points” of “error.” It is the normal curve that permits statisticians not to claim absolute knowledge of all population figures precisely but instead to claim such knowledge within a few percentage points.
Well, what is the evidence for this vital assumption of distribution around a normal curve? None whatever. It is a purely mystical act of faith. In my old statistics text, the only “evidence” for the universal truth of the normal curve was the statement that if good riflemen shoot to hit a bullseye, the shots will tend to be distributed around the target in something like a normal curve. On this incredibly flimsy basis rests an assumption vital to the validity of all statistical inference.

Unfortunately, the social sciences tend to follow the same law that the late Dr. Robert Mendelsohn has shown is adopted in medicine: never drop any procedure, no matter how faulty, until a better one is offered in its place. And now it seems that the entire fallacious structure of inference built on the normal curve has been rendered obsolete by high-tech.

Ten years ago, Stanford statistician Bradley Efron used highspeed computers to generate “artificial data sets” based on an original sample, and to make the millions of numerical calculations necessary to arrive at a population estimate without using the normal curve, or any other arbitrary, mathematical assumption of how samples are distributed about the unknown population figure. After a decade of discussion and tinkering, statisticians have agreed on methods of practical use of this “bootstrap.” method, and it is now beginning to take over the profession. Stanford statistician Jerome H. Friedman, one of the pioneers of the new method, calls it “the most important new idea
in statistics in the last 20 years, and probably the last 50.”

At this point, statisticians are finally willing to let the cat out of the bag. Friedman now concedes that “data don’t always follow bell-shaped curves, and when they don’t, you make a mistake” with the standard methods. In fact, he added that “the data frequently are distributed quite differently than in bell-shaped curves.” So that’s it; now we find that the normal curve Emperor has no clothes after all. The old mystical faith can now be abandoned; the Normal Curve god is dead at long last.

Be seeing you

Lies

Government Central Planning

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