Slogans are for people who need to be told what to think.
Morning Brew prouds itself for "making subscribers smarter in 5 minutes". However, judging by their recent article stating "..more Americans (675,000) have now been killed by Covid-19 than the Spanish flu in 1918–19, making the coronavirus the US’ deadliest pandemic.." that may not be the case. At least when it comes to understanding basic statistics.
Did you know that statistics is the science of both collecting and analyzing data?
Well, in my experience, most people do not know. Certainly, the writers at Morning Brew do not know, because otherwise, they would do basic normalisation of their absolute numbers before the cross-comparison and deadly-wrong conclusions.
How and when data is collected can make all the difference - as you can see if you follow the link below and read the first paragraph under 'unpacking the Spanish flu mortality numbers'. In short, when stats are applied properly, we come to the conclusion that Covid19 would have to kill roughly two million people in the US, during 2020, to just have a similar (so not greater) mortality rate to Spanish flu. And that is just if we normalise absolute numbers of 1918 and 2020 by US total population. And there are other variables that may lead to the conclusion that the number should be even higher to match Spanish flu, such a difference in biological age between 1918 and 2020 population, amount of global travel that would impact speed and geographical spread of the virus, population density etc.
If you are still confused, let us use the following example - inflation. If we compare absolute salaries between 1918 and 2020 using the "Morning Brew approach", we would very much make the wrong conclusion that a person earning 30 000 dollars in 2020 is much richer than a person earning 10 000 dollars in 1918. However, normalising our numbers for inflation - as historically relevant information - we come to the conclusion that 10 000 dollars in 1918 is equivalent to 181,662.25 dollars today. Hence, a person earning 10 000 dollars in 1918 was much, much richer than a person earning 30 000 dollars today.
To cite John P. A. Ioannidis and his publication from 2005: "Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true." A lot of scientists - whether young or more experienced - have difficulty balancing between the conclusions and limitations of their experimental design (context of data collection). Partially, it is a lack of proper training in applying statistics. Partially, it is probably the peer pressure and emphasis of "positive", "statistically significant" results.
Consequently, and very undeservingly, the science of statistics gets a lot of bad rep. When in fact, it is more like giving a child without any proper training to drive, and then blame a car for a crash.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210329.51293/full/
This was a very late recording contrasting two news articles about Omicron - so called "Covid super-strain".
I know I haven't been around lately...work...life...However, the 12-years-old clip popped into my feed and I wanted to share it. The reason? This clip provides the great basic understanding into what are the issues with so-called "evidence" related to anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change and the lack of logic when it comes to the interpretation of such evidence. The sad reality is that even after 12 years from this clip, we are still forced to endure nonsensical conclusions that hurricanes hitting Florida are caused by big bad climate change.
The mainstream media is doubling down on the alarmism, and it is not hard to guess why. However, to be fair, consider my little observation an educated guess, an opinion, rather than the fact. Time will show whether I am right.
(1) 'Climate change affects everyone': Europe battles wildfires in intense heat by Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/spain-portugal-battle-wildfires-heatwaves-scorch-southern-europe-2022-07-17/)
If you spent time in Southern Europe, Mediterranean, during summer season - July and August in particular - you probably know that heat-induced wildfires are nothing new. In fact, they are quite common and remarkably devastating for the affected communities, and I have witnessed several in person. Most of the time, the wildfires occur due to heat igniting grasses, especially in the areas where there are broken glass or broken bottles. The glass serves as an amplifier for the sun rays, especially, in the vicinity of dry grasses, or even dry pine needles, and as ...
