Moderation Questions

Are you referring to people's general inability to come to grips with Bayes' Theorem?

edit to add: you'd need to know the rarity of the disease, the false positive, and the false negative rates to properly calculate it.

That (depending on what proportion of the population is positive), and that saying something is 98% accurate doesn't tell you in what way the other 2% are inaccurate.

No, not really. I mean people generally don't get it. But they also don't get Euclidean Geometry or a host of other topics.

Right. Specifically you'd need to know how likely the person was to have the disease before they were tested.

More than what % of the population has it, you need to know the chances that specific patient has it prior to the test. Like if the disease is super rare but the patient has come in contact with it or is showing symptoms then tests positive they probably have it. Where as a random person that tests positive probably doesn't.

Probably easiest to think of it as the test being just one factor to consider amongst the others you've listed, but not a dispositive factor, even if it is 98% accurate. That also gives you the probability of having it if you tested negative, assuming you are able to suitably quantify all the other relevant factors.

I’m gonna show this to my girl friends at happy hour, it’s gonna be a massive hit, thank you ♥

I'll add to this and go out on a limb to say I think people who believe in a personal god are all pretty stupid, whether they are white, black, yellow, cyan, or magenta.

Or, in lagtight's case, grayscale.

Good lord, I used the wrong "they're" in that post. My eyes are burning just looking at it. I don't remember if this is true but I'm going to claim phone auto-correct because I don't know what else to do except cry.

I’m more in the camp of thinking 10% of people are actually “stupid” in the sense of being unable to do any kind of abstract thinking, at least inherently.

There are plenty of people that have contracted stupidity through lack of exposure to things that inoculate you against stupidity.

I mean, define "clever person". In my definition, believing stupid **** is pretty disqualifying. If you believe dumb **** the chances I consider you clever are pretty much zero.

I have no issue seeing why people think that way, but it often leads to underestimating people badly In the context of politics, this often leads to poor political calculations. A typical case is thinking that stupid ideologies can't have smart believers, and that all seemingly smart believers of stupid ideologies are therefore just frauds who "deep down agree with you".

I don't think they're frauds. I just don't think they are smart.

I wouldn't call anyone who believes in a personal god "smart", for example. They might have an aptitude for some particular field of endeavour, but "smart" is a stretch.

If only there was a way to reasonably measure smartness to avoid personal definitions like this, and if only we had a thread on that in this very section of this very forum!

Intelligence

So using this metric you would argue whites and non Muslim East Asians are generally smart, while browns and blacks aren't?

It seems to me, that not allowing for the possibility of something that can't be measured is not too bright.

You’re greatly underestimating the power of religious brainwashing on children. In many religious communities to reject that religion at any age is tantamount to becoming a social pariah and risks parental and familial rejection.

Participation in religious activities does not confirm belief in god.
I'm sure in these communities there are a good number of participants who are actually non-believers.

What about Isaac Newton?

Hmm, what’s going on in Guyana and Suriname?

lol some hicks in an ugly pickup just rolled coal on me here in Tampa FL. I then cut them off, they cut me back off, middle fingers were exchanged, etc. I mean, it wasn't just me, it was a busy road, but most of the smog hit my car

Do you people in blue states ever get coal-rolled? Never lived in one. Happened once, iirc, in the other red state in which I've lived.

I drive a non-American car (like some 66+% of all US drivers); I wonder if that offended them, or if they were simply starved for attention. In any case, these mother****ers deserve to die, but I'll settle for the high likelihood they're miserable life-failures and this is the only way they can get back at the libs or whomever else they pretend is respsonsible for their failures.

They're very culturally distinct from the rest of South America due to not being settled by the Spanish or Portuguese.

I wonder if their truck costs more than your car though.

I'm currently in a red part of California but no coal rolling here.