Bijou Drains
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Alien 1 listened to about 2 and 1/2 minutes of his talk and found a number of issues, couldn’t be bothered to listen to much more.
He doesn’t understand the difference between false positives, accuracy and or sensitivity/specificity and he doesn’t even go on to discuss the other side of the issue false negatives.
For a start he quotes government figures for accuracy (not specificity or sensitivity, which I’ll come back to later) as being between 0.8% and 4.3% and then states that he will take an average of 2.1%. Just to be clear 2.1% is not the average or the mean as he describes it, it is the median, the mid way point between two numbers, this is GCSE beginners maths, if he doesn’t understand that, he is obviously a bit of a duck egg.
He then goes on to use 2.8% as a figure to work out the false positives, however 2.8% (notionally accepting his figures) refers to the accuracy of the test. What he needs to know is the sensitivity/specificity.
Sensitivity measures the proportion of positives that are correctly identified (e.g., the percentage of sick people who are correctly identified as having some illness).
Specificity measures the proportion of negatives that are correctly identified (e.g., the percentage of healthy people who are correctly identified as not having some illness).
With the coronavirus test, reseach (Oxford University, etc) show that there are very few false positives (in one piece of research all positive tests were retested three times and found to be accurate). However levels of false negatives were running at about 5%, so the test was deemed to have low sensitivity, i.e. a relatively low percentage of sick people who were correctly identified.
The problem is that people are getting a negative test and thinking, all is ok, it might not be.
I know there are a lot of BBC haters out there, but the Radio 4 programme, “More or Less” is really well worth listening to, they are excellent at going through some of these statistical claims and pulling them apart, and for sad bastards like me, it’s half an hour of bliss listening to people talking about statistics.
L Bird, Ill give just one example of your method of taking things out of context and then answering the question which suits you.
I asked you “However the question I posed you was regards to the sensory nature of human existence, one which you continuously and studiously ignore.” Your reply was that you have “never, ever ‘ignored’ ‘human existence’”. As is quite obvious, I was stating that you ignored the question, not human existence.
Just to be pedantic, if I was lying about you on the forum, it would be libel not slander, slander only applies to the spoken word. The other thing you would need to show was that any lie reduced your reputation to those who read it. I think it would be futile of me to try and do that, considering what a good job your already doing on without any outside assistance.
Going back to the issue in hand, “can you list even ten “discoveries of science” that have not been based on things that have been sensed, including by observation”
Not such a difficult task for an avian of your ability.
Moving on you state “if one ‘touches matter’, one is engaging in ‘labour’;”, so I take it from that statement that you acknowledge that there is a “something” to be touched?
L Bird – You’ll have to read about the physics (or any science) yourself, BD.
I’ve given up trying to reason with those who will not engage in faithful discussion.
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I have studied and read science to quite a reasonable level. However the question I posed you was regards to the sensory nature of human existance, one which you continuously and studiously ignore. I will ask again, can you give me any example of a scientific theory which is not based on sensory inputs?
Please also point out where my discussion has not been “faithful” whatever you mean by the use of that word.
Good to see you’re back Birdy Boy
now perhaps you can get on with answering this (to recap)
Bijou Drains wrote: “Actually, practically everything in science can be sensed in a direct way…”
L Bird wrote: “We’ll have to agree to disagree, on this one, BD.
If I were to produce a list of ‘stuff’ from ‘science’, which neither of us, or anyone else, has even touched, etc., I’d be here till xmas!”
Bijou Drains wrote: “L Bird Touch is not the only sense, observation is through the sense of smell. So if you can list even ten “discoveries of science” that have not been based on things that have been sensed, including by observation I would be amazed. So off you go then, set yourself away.”
So come on, where’s your list?
The move to reopen universities was an absolutely appauling one. Newcastle has a student population of about 50,000 students, all based in halls of residence and houses in mutliple occupation, mainly around the city centre, it’s the same in many other cities. Liverpool has three Universities, Leeds two, Sheffield two, all with student s based close to city centres. I’m sure the decision was based on bailing our the Universities which are big businesses now, a lot of them have their own halls of residence which contribute to their running costs, they make money on all the campus bookshops, coffee bars, coke machines, etc. It’s even worse for small university cities like Durham, it has a population of 48,000 and about 20,000 students in attendance.
I was being sarcastic, to get some allies against the avian, Bijou.
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Well you soitenly fooled me, Stanley. BD plays with tie, straightens bowler hat and walks away into the distance
Bijou, I am a member of the party.
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Sorry TM, I just took it from the following contribution you made very early in ths thread, in response to L Bird that you were not a member of the party:
So humans decide, according to their class and time, how the planets move, whether a dropped fork will obey gravity, how suns are formed, and how far away they would like the sun to be?
The universe obeys mankind?
Did the universe exist before humans?And this is interesting, thank you.
I now know the view of the SPGB.
All best wishes.Apologies
Seeings as how this debate is going off on a tangent, a very interesting one, by the way. Can I go off on a tangent of my own?
TM you re clearly very familiar with the Party case, and from your postings it seems that you agree with what we say, you even refer to distributing our material. Have you ever thought of joining us? (you may well have been a member in the past) and following on from that, why don’t you join (rejoin)? We certainly could do with your help.
I was taking to a family member who is an anti vaxer recently and they made the comment, “what good have vaccines ever done?” Which sort of shows the level of the anti vaxer debate. It when a bit pythonesque, as I asked “you mean apart from the complete eradication of small pox, the almost complete eradication of diphtheria and polio, the massive suppression of TB, whooping cough, tetanus, mumps and rubella, the fall in the number of brain damaged children as a result of measles, the reduction in deaths as a result of the flu jab, apart from that not very much. “
I’ll be getting my flu jab, and if/when the Covid 19 vaccine is ready I’ll be first in the queue, litle old ladies, the disabled and the vulnerable will be lying in my wake as I get in first!
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
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You want to be careful matey, there was another bloke called Thomas More who was saying positive things about the Catholic Church, look what happened to him!
It’s interesting that Andrew Wakefield is supported by one of the colleges of chiropractors, another bunch of evidence free schisters.
L. Bird has not replied to my question of what he thinks of Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Brian Cox etc. Are they bourgeois scientists and hence not to be esteemed by socialists? The same question applies to Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Copernicus, etc.
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Sadly this is L Bird’s pattern, comes in hijacks the topic, throws around all kinds of ridiculous statements, and then when the going gets sticky and there are a few questions he can’t answer (he has studiously ignored one of mine in this thread) he buggers off.
His next move will be to come back in a few week’s time, claiming to have trounced the arguments of everyone on here and then start spouting he same horse shit all over again.
But in our kindly, tolerant, demcratic way, we let him get on with it. It’s a bit like having a stray cat that comes and shits in your garden, you know it’s a pest, you get sick of clearing up the shit, but if you haven’t seen it for a while you get a bit worried about whether or not it’s ok.
Getting back to the original point of this post all of the anti science bullshit out there, as well as the general atmosphere of being anti expert, I also think that a lot of this stuff is out there for financial reasons. If you look at the case of the proven fraudulent research carried out by Andrew Wakefield on Autism and the MMR jab, his motivation was to profit from the legal claims that would come from it. He has now gone to the States and is coining it in from publishing the same rubbish, but there is a gullible audience that will buy it. A lot of the conspiracy websites have advertising and other associated income streams, get a lot of traffic and your in the money.
There is a similar thing going on with football at the moment, sites set up to report spurious football transfers (Messi to Hartlepool United, etc. If your reading this Harley, it’s not true, sadly he’s not on his way to the Victoria Ground) which then make money when the click bait is responded to.
From the point of view of those who get lured into this nonsense, I think a big part of it for them, is the idea of being in on the know, that you know something that others don’t and that when you tell them you can bathe in the kudos it brings. It’s a bit like an elaborate version of knowing a bit of juicy gossip.
Wez “Bijou – I may be mistaken but weren’t Einstein’s theories of relativity entirely the result of ‘thought experiments’?”
the point is that the thought experiments he used were attempts to expain observable evidence that he sought to explain, without the observable phenomena, there was nothing to explain or attempt to understand. I wouldn’t have a reason to find an explanation for the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, if I haven’t observed something that might be a weasel under the cocktail cabinet
