First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--Well, the science deniers are attacking all of the sciences, AND I AM SPEAKING OUT.
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
I spoke out on the attack on health physics yesterday, and because I enjoy self-mental mutilation, I thought I'd select another video (it will be the last though, only so much I can bear) from Ignorance Fest 2012 (the Doctors For Emergency Preparedness meeting of July 28).
This one seemed promising because it didn't seem like it was going to be the tired old attack on evolution or global warming. It seemed to be on statistics. I've covered math deniers before, but they're more rare. I'm 99% confident, this talk will be full of bias and errors.
Well, that video did the trick! Thanks Dr. Matt Briggs.
We know that the DFDP are right-wing, free market ideologues, so political jabs are expected and delivered.
Briggs says he found less employment from the "meteorological line" (field of climatology), and I can see why. He tries to pin fallacies on people who aren't engaging in fallacies. The irony is that he is!
His major point is that some people cherry-pick a particular causation in a study which shows correlation. The study usually includes a p-value. He thinks that people rely on the p-value in favor of the particular cause.
The p-value just tells one how likely it is that the result (a refutation of a null hypothesis) could have happened by chance alone. It is based on the assumption that the data is normally distributed, which itself could be wrong. Typically, to reject the null hypothesis, a p-value less than 0.05 is desired (less than 5% chance the findings were due to chance).
It has nothing to do with whether the study was well-designed and implemented nor about causation. He goes into this much later in the video, but his mistake is that he thinks no one else understands it. Most people who work with it do understand it, a minority don't. Ironically, he questions his audience and they are not quite clear on it. HA!
The vast majority of people understand that they have to look at underlying mechanisms in order to propose causation. The Bradford-Hill criteria is a common guide.
Just because someone publishes something doesn't mean they're engaging in the "overconfident expert fallacy". That's a huge generalization. If an author has screwed up, someone will let them know. That's the point of doing the study and publishing it. His imagined fallacy is a fallacy.
I'm not going to address some of the specifics he gets into in the studies, because I don't have them at hand.
But note the BIG PICTURE...Briggs is engaging in typical denialist behavior. He says he provided input to the air pollution board and they decided not to act upon them (he says it has something to do with consistency of mistakes, I don't know the details). So now he's a whiner because his approach was discarded. He's attacking the science from the periphery...in this case in a cult meeting, instead of being more scientifically persuasive. These people are like chihuahuas nipping at the ankles of a runner who is trying to make progress.
Briggs claims the air pollution board tied two different facts together: 1) fine particulates increase risk of heart disease, 2) heart disease is #1 killer in the state. Briggs is proposing that the board is saying that 1) is the primary contributor to heart disease and then refutes that. That's a strawman fallacy. The conclusion of 1) was based on three studies. The conclusion of 2) is based on state health registries, it doesn't follow from 1) as Briggs claims.
And the audience laughs with Briggs, while I'm laughing too, just not with them.
He says the EPA engages in the ecologic fallacy all the time. That's simply a lie. But if you look at health physics deniers, they do engage in it all the time (see last post, when they came for health physics).
Briggs tries to trash a radon study due to the Confidence Interval which might go below 1. That's cherry-picking. That's diverting attention from the measured data into the lower bound, as if the lower bound was the REALtm answer. He says, "so essentially they found no effect". It's ironic that he later mentions confirmation bias, which is what he just engaged in. He cherry-picked the lower bound to confirm there is no effect because that's the answer he wants. Why not the upper bound?
Then he tries to ridicule statistics by showing some contrary headlines on certain subjects. Sometime it's not clear what the biological endpoints are ("healthy vs. not healthy" may be increased anti-oxidants vs. high fat, two things which have nothing to do with each other), and sometimes a new study brings new evidence to light and overturns an older study. That's how science progresses! And they're laughing.
Briggs frequently confuses a hypothesis with a theory. A hypothesis is an initial idea which needs to be tested, but a theory is a conclusion based on a large group of evidence from many studies which tested many hypotheses over many years. Briggs can't even get the basics right.
Ironically, he talks about folks in the soft sciences citing each other (which is okay if the studies are valid). See my post from yesterday which shows that that is exactly what health physics deniers do except they employ invalid studies and propaganda.
And then he came for climatology (end of video)....what a surprise! I wonder if they had the a.c. on?
Briggs says he found less employment from the "meteorological line" (field of climatology), and I can see why. He tries to pin fallacies on people who aren't engaging in fallacies. The irony is that he is!
His major point is that some people cherry-pick a particular causation in a study which shows correlation. The study usually includes a p-value. He thinks that people rely on the p-value in favor of the particular cause.
The p-value just tells one how likely it is that the result (a refutation of a null hypothesis) could have happened by chance alone. It is based on the assumption that the data is normally distributed, which itself could be wrong. Typically, to reject the null hypothesis, a p-value less than 0.05 is desired (less than 5% chance the findings were due to chance).
It has nothing to do with whether the study was well-designed and implemented nor about causation. He goes into this much later in the video, but his mistake is that he thinks no one else understands it. Most people who work with it do understand it, a minority don't. Ironically, he questions his audience and they are not quite clear on it. HA!
The vast majority of people understand that they have to look at underlying mechanisms in order to propose causation. The Bradford-Hill criteria is a common guide.
Just because someone publishes something doesn't mean they're engaging in the "overconfident expert fallacy". That's a huge generalization. If an author has screwed up, someone will let them know. That's the point of doing the study and publishing it. His imagined fallacy is a fallacy.
I'm not going to address some of the specifics he gets into in the studies, because I don't have them at hand.
But note the BIG PICTURE...Briggs is engaging in typical denialist behavior. He says he provided input to the air pollution board and they decided not to act upon them (he says it has something to do with consistency of mistakes, I don't know the details). So now he's a whiner because his approach was discarded. He's attacking the science from the periphery...in this case in a cult meeting, instead of being more scientifically persuasive. These people are like chihuahuas nipping at the ankles of a runner who is trying to make progress.
Briggs claims the air pollution board tied two different facts together: 1) fine particulates increase risk of heart disease, 2) heart disease is #1 killer in the state. Briggs is proposing that the board is saying that 1) is the primary contributor to heart disease and then refutes that. That's a strawman fallacy. The conclusion of 1) was based on three studies. The conclusion of 2) is based on state health registries, it doesn't follow from 1) as Briggs claims.
And the audience laughs with Briggs, while I'm laughing too, just not with them.
He says the EPA engages in the ecologic fallacy all the time. That's simply a lie. But if you look at health physics deniers, they do engage in it all the time (see last post, when they came for health physics).
Briggs tries to trash a radon study due to the Confidence Interval which might go below 1. That's cherry-picking. That's diverting attention from the measured data into the lower bound, as if the lower bound was the REALtm answer. He says, "so essentially they found no effect". It's ironic that he later mentions confirmation bias, which is what he just engaged in. He cherry-picked the lower bound to confirm there is no effect because that's the answer he wants. Why not the upper bound?
Then he tries to ridicule statistics by showing some contrary headlines on certain subjects. Sometime it's not clear what the biological endpoints are ("healthy vs. not healthy" may be increased anti-oxidants vs. high fat, two things which have nothing to do with each other), and sometimes a new study brings new evidence to light and overturns an older study. That's how science progresses! And they're laughing.
Briggs frequently confuses a hypothesis with a theory. A hypothesis is an initial idea which needs to be tested, but a theory is a conclusion based on a large group of evidence from many studies which tested many hypotheses over many years. Briggs can't even get the basics right.
Ironically, he talks about folks in the soft sciences citing each other (which is okay if the studies are valid). See my post from yesterday which shows that that is exactly what health physics deniers do except they employ invalid studies and propaganda.
And then he came for climatology (end of video)....what a surprise! I wonder if they had the a.c. on?
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