When I'm done with high priority tasks, I will be writing up some articles that show mathematically that the pyramid of evidence is a sham. It's not based on mathematics. It's statistics used inappropriately all over the place, and especially in the area called "evidence-based medicine" which should be renamed "rules of thumb if you don'…
When I'm done with high priority tasks, I will be writing up some articles that show mathematically that the pyramid of evidence is a sham. It's not based on mathematics. It's statistics used inappropriately all over the place, and especially in the area called "evidence-based medicine" which should be renamed "rules of thumb if you don't have time for real math".
Most of the fields of biomedical and epidemiological math are not defensible as statistics. They are scarcely better than psychology, which is a real topic of course, but for which statistics can only usually be used to build on assumptions, not like the harder sciences.
Isn't it interesting how the "pyramid of evidence" goes from lowest-cost, most readily available types evidence gathering up to something only the "elites" in the scientific community are "allowed" to do?
It's almost like the pyramid is more a justification for control than anything else.
It's sure taking awhile for the peddlers of commercialised nonsense to be brought to heel. That it would take a mountain of bodies was not unimaginable, given that the simplest of distinctions such as that made between statistical and clinical significance are now beyond the ken of most, and the political mode of demarcation, the precautionary principle is rooted scientivism dogma and modeling that fuels the pressitutes and monstrously overpaid public health risk mongers alike.
'The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge' (2016)
I am always going to return to my old saws: (1) science, 'qua' science, viz., "good" science (what other kind would you want) is not the problem, it is part of the solution; (2) most of what people are (rightfully) complaining about is NOT science: it is technology---there is a huge step there where in the introduction of more anti-human meddling can occur; (3) science needs to be properly situated in a broader philosophical framework. In universities, for practical reasons, courses in philosophy are listed in the catalogs along with advanced microeconomic analysis and European history1800-1913. But philosophy should be an encompassing discipline, not a side-by-side, menu item.
Don't worry, I have a feeling that I will be repeating this.
Sort of like the 'problems' of free speech (and capitalism). There may be and are 'problems', but most are 'fixed' by more free speech (and more real capitalism). Hell of a lot better than centralized government, and a command economy. And the modern idea of 'community rights' over individual rights, is total BS. We don't live as communities, we live as individuals.
Agreed, Richard A. Yes. I would say that what poses as capitalism at the moment--this weird private-public partnership of lawless rulemaking, surveillance and coercion (the private part, e.g., Larry Fink, George Soros), backed up by biases judges and the gun (the public part, e.g., Merrick Garland, Gavin Newsome)--is not capitalism. Thus, I think, what you meant by your qualifier: "real."
I would also like to see an appreciation for, not just free speech and not just free debate (where goodwill cannot necessarily be assumed), but an uncodifiable thing: free and genuine conversation. We have to be educated into that and into the idea that real politics is, as Aristotle said, the art of friendship. But then, they almost killed him just like they killed his mentor's mentor. Apparently, real conversation is just too painful for some folks to tolerate. In the upside-down world, being weighed down with all sorts of ugly baggage allows the unprincipled to float to the top.
...and let's not forget our beloved food pyramid of the 50s and 60s that was endorsed by the food companies that encouraged us to eat lots of carbs and especially sugar for that energy boost.
I remember that, and that trans fats were supposed to be better. Turns out that that was wrong too, at one point, the one single thing that you could do to improve your health was STOP eating trans fats.
They've been wrong a LOT regarding diet. Everything my grandmother did, eating buttered toast and eggs and bacon everyday, only enabled her to live to 94.
The A = B approach arose because it was too much to continue to hear the v injured speak the languaging similiar to "commonality does not imply causality" as a "disclaimer" ...it was if they had to learn the "speak" in order to be taken even somewhat seriously and not be censored, bashed, etc for speaking up. And we clearly all know these injuries aren't "anxiety".
Here's the example:
(A) Someone gets the shot and (B) there's a health issue that happens afterwards
(B) The health issue that happened afterwords is (C) a new issue, something weird or different, an old issue that's resurfaced, etc
Therefore, (A) Because someone got the shot, the (C) new issue, etc is caused by the shot - v injury
This approach has worked for me. Sometimes I follow up with if it looks like a duck and smells like a duck, it's a duck.
The closer the 'injury' happens (time wise) after the vaccine, the closer the correlation. Let me know if you disagree. (everything else being the same)
And over all mortality has been going up after the 'vaccines' started. All kinds of things, not just what you might expect. It's a very large percentage too, you might have already heard about it. Life insurance companies have been complaining.
Also the records regarding military members have gone up a LOT too. And the obvious lies and clumsy changes of the statistics have not helped to convince people (at least me) either.
hmm, I'm interested in that too. I can see how you could say something like
(A)vax_spike ~= (B) virus spike*
(B)virus_spike = (C)harm
(A)vax_spike = (C) harm
*(they are not exactly the same, the vax spike is closed conformation, but is still able to bind to ACE-2. from the cell paper they showed higher levels of spike in vax blood than in that of an acute infection)
Also for the clinical trial just using a basic algebra ...
without any intervention we expect the all cause serious adverse events to be about the same in the test and control group of a Random Control Trial
baseline_test = baseline_control
after intervention we expect the all cause serious adverse events to be *statistically* less in the test group vs. the control group
This is not what the pfizer trial showed. For all cause serious adverse events(requiring medical intervention) the outcomes were about the same for both groups.
Here I'm assuming that vaccine caused harm is how the equation gets balanced, but maybe there is some other reason or possibly the trial was not done well and
please point out if I've gotten something wrong. I've tried this reasoning with pro-vax groups and they always come back at me with something like how I can't expect the vaccine to prevent someone from getting a kidney infection.
And the fact that the control group was eliminated, does not build confidence. In fact, it convinces me of mens rea, which is obvious evidence AGAINST the 'vaccines' (definition of vaccine had to be changed, removing the word 'immunity' to the word 'helps' instead. That should REALLY raise people's suspicions, IMO)
If you want to study a classic government scam - study the requirement for preoperative beta blocker use prior to cardiac surgery. It was put into place with minimal evidence from a poorly designed trial, then evidence has mounted that the use is harmful, then the government keeps it in place for 10 plus more years. Thats why I have no confidence that they will remove vaccine mandates any time soon.
Similar situation in the use of X-ray on women’s pelvises to determine if they could give birth. Which in and of its self was ridiculous given the levels of relaxin in her body and the fact that the human head is design to mould during delivery. The doctor who discovered that this was exposing babies to radiation and they were developing cancer was very concerned about doing follow up research quickly because she assumed these exposed children would soon not be available to use for research. This assumption was driven by the idea that the use of X-ray in delivery would be stopped… except it didn’t happen. It continued to be used for at least a decade more. Who do you know today who would not scoff at the idea of using X-ray on a pregnant women?
I worked for a wholesale loan company that was embarrassed when a fico number came out to be a whole number, so they routinely modified them to look more credible.
Thank you, Mathew. That will be a real contribution. I am sure you are aware of literature showing that must, if not most, reporting of medical research is unreliable (to put it politely). To be fair, measurement in biological sciences is fraught with difficulties, real-world challenges to the central limit theorem, that measuring, say, the characteristics of a laser beam or the tensile strength of a steel wire, are not subjected too.
However, there are real possibilities for improving what is within the power of the human experimenter to accomplish. I am thinking of types of studies, like from a physiology department, involving sample sizes of six. Yikes! This is not unusual when the experiments involve large animal surgery and are expensive. As you know, there is a direct way of determining the necessary sample size, but one needs to feed a good estimate of expected variability into that equation for iterative production of a result. I suspect some overly generous estimating going on there.
I have never produced metanalyses myself. They make me uneasy. In terms of reforming science, I would like to see the funding agencies and regulators recombined for assessing the grunt-work studies. These would comprise reviewers and specialists who could farm out proposed verification experiments.
These types of experiments, "studies," would be those not generally considered to be the kind involving ideas and mechanisms that would likely get one a Nobel Prize, but they need to be done. These would be the types of research (literally, 're-' + 'searching') that pharmaceutical developers need to do to establish safety and efficacy.
Rather than a hodgepodge of methodologies used by labs with tendentious interests, perhaps university laboratories could apply or bid on these put up as offering by the central agency. We may need government researchers doing the tests in the lab, getting "wet" so to speak, not merely reviewing submissions.
I can hear the protests of expense. To this I reply, "How much was spent on shutting down the economic systems of the world on very bad science?"
The farming out of these kinds of studies would mandate the exact procedure. It would be brutally uncreative work for the laboratorians. But this is precisely the kind of rigidity that is supposed to be practiced in hospital laboratories. There are people who are actually ideally suited for this type of work. They delight in a well-analyzed job. They enjoy methodology and the challenges of a tight and reproducible signal-to-noise ratio.
This would also be a great opportunity for graduate students to learn the craft of doing a variety of experiments, laboratory discipline, patience and detailed knowledge of the reagents, analytical instruments, material science and statistical methods that are presently skimmed over in the rush-job world that our present economy demands. It is almost as though people popping out of college with relevant degrees would "work in the vineyards" before going on to degree-granting programs. Or perhaps it could be worked into a revised version of the, now somewheres obsolescent, stage of the master's degree.
This would be a system set apart from the funding/granting of fundamental, novel and highly-creative research into physical and biological mechanisms. Admission into such programs could take applicants from the "Research Corps" as I fancifully played with above, but these advanced programs would primarily take those students who by the end of high school or university have displayed extremes of intellect and capacity for fertile scientific thought.
Just some fragmentary thoughts having read your comment. I only suggest these ideas to get the discussion going---not as a well-worked out plan.
David, speaking as a physical methods experimental chemist, virtually every measurement is subject to systematic errors that violate the assumptions of the central limit theorem.
There's an irreducible lower limit of deterministic uncertainty that never averages away. Hence the critical need for instrumental calibration; an experimental necessity that is often neglected.
In AGW consensus climate science, for example, calibration is not only ignored it's not even understood.
[Oops, I seem to have lost another response in progress. Here we go again.]
Pat, thanks. Spoken like a true, physical methods experimental chemist! This is an interesting theoretical query.
Systematic error (and its subset, instrumental error) does not alter the shape of a Normal Distribution, the population mean (mu) nor the variance or its square root (sigma). These are the properties of Nature.
Rather, systematic error shifts the sample mean (x-bar) with preservation of the sample standard deviation.
For example, on a day with steady wind, a systematic error, unless corrected for, will act on bullets traveling toward a target equally, adding a systematic bias. The cluster of bullets holes produced by an otherwise expert marksman will--under such uncorrected conditions--be deflected to one side of the bullseye by the degree of systematic influence. Accuracy will be degraded, not precision.
As another example, teachers adding some equal number of points to every student's test score are making a systematic adjustment. [By the way, this is not a true "curving" of the scores.]
In nature, collections of even similar things, members of a set, nonetheless vary in counts and measurements of these things, despite--collectively--their having a mean value. The collected sizes of the variation tend to produce distributions that are normal and whose bell-curve shape--for the general reader--can be completely determined by the population mean and the standard deviation. This produces an awe-inspiring fixity, as I see it. Otherwise, nothing would have any meaning. A hydrogen atom could have a range of sizes from 1/1,000,000th it accepted size to that of the size of Jupiter. It would be a psychotic world of sensory data that the mind could not apprehend. It would be a world where a grasshopper could chase a lion and women could be men.
The coalescence of measurements about a value that is the mean represents an underlying, normative (lawful) aspect of nature. Every discipline ending in the suffix, 'logy' (from, Gr., "logos") reflects its self-aware effort to understand the order of the universe ("An end to the means!" Haha. Gee, that was a shamefully-nerdy attempt at humor and cleverness.)
As you are aware, the statisticians refer to this piling up of measurements at the mean a consequence or restatement of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). The piling up of measurements results from the additive effects of all the factors that can cause measurements of a single property to deviate from the mean, both large and small factors, and factors that both tend to locate an individual measurement above or below the true, population mean.
It is recognized that, in the biological disciplines, there is more variability of measurements. In many cases, the assumption of a normal curve following the descriptive Gaussian equation (https://academo.org/demos/gaussian-distribution/) does not hold, although there may be a clustering of values within the space of possibilities: it is just that a nice, bell curve is not followed.
This misbehavior, if you will, of biological systems upon measurement is described as being due to the set of factors that produce deviations above and below the mean. It is a rougher assortment of sizes of these "buffeting" factors around the mean. This is why non-parametric statistical methods often are resorted to when dealing with biological data. "Non-parametric" properties--and tests for the same--do not assume the same "lawfulness of shape" of the distribution as in the case of the normal, bell curve.
I think, Pat, that the point of difference here is that you, as a laboratory chemist, are focused on MEASURED values, almost always samples of the population (or, universe). Measurements typically involve instruments and instruments unavoidable introduce deviations into the flow of information.
But instruments tend to introduce both noisy errors above and below the means (affecting sample stardard deviations but not means), as well as systematic, unidirectional errors (affecting means and not standard deviations). Restated, systematic and instrumental errors affect sample measurements, not the population characteristics and, again, sample means (x-bar).
Additionally, the distinction between much of biological systems and physical systems is that biological systems are less lawful than physical systems (broadly speaking, of course) and that normality tends to be more degraded towards non-parametric behavior not only of sampled, measured values and their means and standard deviations (x-bar and s-bar, resp.), but also of their POPULATION means and standard deviations (mu and sigma, resp.). Put another way, the Central Limit Theorem in many biological systems is challenged, unlike in many physical systems.
This is a partial explanation why physical laboratorians, versus biological laboratorians, can produce "cleaner" data and why, to be merciful, the biological scientists often have a more difficult time at some levels of analysis of their phenomena of interest.
I have had the benefit (and the curse) of working with both physical and biological phenomena on the same project. Characterizing the physical stimuli, for instance, is a charmed task compared to accomplishing the same with the output response of the biological system.
In summary, systematic, including instrumental, error does not alter the lawfulness of population means and their population standard deviations (features of Nature herself), only sample means. This is not only not a challenge to the Central Limit Theorem (CLT), but it reinforces its reality.
In Biology the factors producing variation degrade the lawful, normative expression of the CLT and--in acting upon the population mean and standard deviation, also alter our window into the population means via sampling---and even the strength of the assumption of the normal curve.
David, you wrote, "Systematic error (and its subset, instrumental error) does not alter the shape of a Normal Distribution..."
Yes, it does. In a specific example, every single published air temperature sensor field calibration experiment of which I'm aware, has produced a non-normal error distribution. Typically skewed warm.
When the error is due to uncontrolled environmental variables, the mean, empirical standard deviation, and distribution are all time-wise inconstant.
You wrote, “Rather, systematic error shifts the sample mean (x-bar) with preservation of the sample standard deviation.”
Your argument assumes a constant influence throughout, e.g., a steady wind. One invariably sees this claim in statistical treatments of error.
In experimental reality, the condition of a constant offset error is rarely if ever true. Each measurement has its own bias offset error. But when the uncontrolled variables are inconstant, the bias offset error changes with each measurement. As the true value is always unknown, the magnitude of the bias offset is always unknown. Hence the need for a calibration experiment against a reference standard. In your shooter example, the bullseye is a known. In experimental science, the bullseye is unknown.
In field calibrations of air temperature sensors, the calibration standard is typically an aspirated sensor. These are usually accurate to ±0.1 C. Solar irradiance and wind speed are not constant. Measurement errors are not constant. The error distributions of hundreds to thousands of measurements, each taken mere minutes apart, are not normal. And the error means also vary from time-to-time.
See, for example, the error distributions in Huwald, et al., (2009) “Albedo effect on radiative errors in air temperature measurements” https://doi.org/10.1029/2008WR007600
These field calibrations typically include thousands of measurements. Were the error populations normal, there are enough measurements to produce the Gaussian distribution. But normal distributions do not appear because the uncontrolled environmental variables impacting the sensor are themselves non-random. In Winter, for example, the radiation screen can become clogged on one side with snow. Or not. Or more snow or less from Winter to Winter and from week to week in a given Winter.
In my professional work in X-ray absorption spectroscopy, we never assumed constant offsets or normal distributions for systematic measurement error. We paid strict attention to that problem.
One of the uncontrolled variables was heating of the single-crystal monochromator by the X-ray beam. This causes drift of unknown magnitude in X-ray energy. Monochromators are now liquid-nitrogen cooled. This has resolved much of that problem. But others remain significant such as sample homogeneity, data normalization and calibration errors (often sample-dependent) among others. Total error is the sum of all these errors; each one of unknown magnitude. The parent populations of such errors are unlikely to be normally distributed.
The outcome of refractory uncertainty is not as dire as you make out. Hard work and attention to detail can reduce but not entirely eliminate systematic error and its resultant uncertainty. Ultimately, the lower limit of uncertainty is the always finite instrumental resolution. If residual uncertainty is small relative to the quantity measured, one has a good handle on knowledge.
Your example of the hydrogen atom is a bit ironic because the electron occupancy becomes unity only at infinity. In principle the electron orbital of a hydrogen atom fills the entire universe.
The CLT only tells one the mean of a distribution. It does not change the shape of the distribution.
I recently read James & Fox (1972).” Comparative Sea-surface Temperature measurements (WMO-No. 336): Results of a programme of comparative measurements conducted under the auspices of the Commission for Marine Meteorology (5),” a truly excellent piece of work.
In dealing with systematic error in sea surface measurements, they note that, “Systematic differences are associated with the accuracy of the instruments used and, if a bias is identified, corrections made to reduce the differences. … In any case, the correction would only reduce the difference in temperatures measured by two different procedures, and would not improve the accuracy of the observation.”
The CLT permits correction of a bias. It does not normalize a distribution or improve accuracy.
This quantitative modesty is a rigorous standard in experimental physical science. How can one even correct a mean bias when the true magnitude is unknown?
When a calibration experiment reveals a non-normal error distribution, one lives with it if one can, e.g., <±10% of the measurement mean, and applies the empirical standard deviation as an uncertainty attached to every measurement.
It’s nice to live in a world where errors are restricted to electronic noise and known offsets. But in the world of experimental physical science, that is rarely if ever true.
Patrick, and those in the general audience still interested "drilled down" technical point---maybe not many.
I believe you are making my point for me. My point was that there in more inherent variability and tendency to deviate from normality in many (of course, not all) biological systems than in many (of course, not all) purely physical systems under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the distribution may not infrequently be multimodal.
The better example for the physical system--as I want to make my point--would be the data from the manufacturer's development or QC procedures for the temperature sensors you are using. Skewing actually does not present as serious a problem in testing normal distributions as one might think (means of means).
The measurement of temperature sensors under uncontrolled field conditions approaches some of the very characteristics that biological systems do. Thus, your example, though abiotic, deviates from the more ideal cases of measuring single physical characteristics 'ceteris paribus', all other things being equal (constant). The wind (which is obviously not the output of a temperature sensor, is an external factor that adds, especially in the short term, some very unbalanced factors (e.g., gusts).
But, the underlying physical behavior of the sensor, even if somewhat skewed for some technical reason involving--I don't know--a thermistor circuit or something, should be smoothly lawful. THAT is what our imagined example actually involves. That is wherein lies the true mean value. Your taking it into the field produces the actual measured situation about which, 'vis-a-vis' the sensor's behavior as the principal figure of merit, there is no "true" combined-factor behavior.
I got it, you are measuring temperature behavior. The sensor is merely the device which you would like to treat as a true reporter or values---but that does not model well the point that I was trying to make about the behavior of biological systems. Your climatic conditions in the field, again, comes closer to the biological systems in the distribution of their true values as well as their measured values.
Hi David -- you might want to take a look at the errors due to self-heating in electronic temperature sensors in Lin, & Hubbard (2004) "Sensor and Electronic Biases/Errors in Air Temperature Measurements in Common Weather Station Networks" https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0426(2004)021<1025:SAEEIA>2.0.CO;2
The problem is never simple. Gusts today, still air tomorrow. Instrumental behavior is always lawful in that its physics is always followed. But a normal distribution of errors is rarely a good assumption in the physical sciences, unless one is very fortunate. Using a well-engineered instrument, i.e., a mature measurement system, it's possible that measurement errors have been reduced to negligible. But negligible doesn't mean normal.
In any case, I understand your point. Thanks for the conversation. :-)
Patrick, you bet! That was fun. We probably played out the conversation beyond what is of general interest now at Steve's site. It is probably time to get back to COVID, pseudovaccines and the systems-theoretical problems that produced that.
I plan to do some thermal measurements as part of a medical research project. I will take special note of the reference that you send.
So, I think I would treat the sensor in the controlled, laboratory situation of the engineer and climate scientist as providing the best estimate (x-bar) of the true mean (mu). Then the field work adds all the variable factors---but in your case, THAT is actually what you are interested in. You are interested in the sources of perturbation! On top of that, if I envision correctly the challenge that faces you, you need to be able to at least record these separate perturbing factors separately to be able to study them.
But AGW uses magic math! It allows better accuracy than the instruments in places that weren't even measured! It'll even open stuck jars, cook a whole chicken, and make an entire fishing rod fit in your pocket!
If you act now, you'll get two for the price of one!
The combined Vatican and CDC of the AGW crowd is the UN IPCC and their report in April of last year was eagerly anticipated. Oopsie, however, because when the report came out they were forced to say QUOTE "ALL of our 73 models are running way too hot".
So sure enough, the follow up UN IPCC WGII-6 report that came out a few weeks ago contained the money shot, for those who were listening, QUOTE: "The historic focus on scientific literature has been increasingly supplanted by emphases on social justice, equity, and climate justice."
Translation: None of the science supports our conclusions.
These should be considered in the same light as the religious wars of the past, the expenditure of vast sums of money and human lives in the service of an ideology. The War On The Weather is an especially egregious example of this, where vast sums will be stolen and misdirected in the service of their religious belief system, but it will be completely impossible to determine whether any "progress" is being made. At least in The Crusades they could count the bodies of dead Muslims on the battlefield...
"Rather than a hodgepodge of methodologies used by labs with tendentious interests, perhaps university laboratories could apply or bid on these put up as offering by the central agency."
Universities are not unbiased. They are funded by special interests and I believe the largest is the pharmaceutical industry.
Not to be cynical, but the entire allopathic medical industry is fraught with more assumptions and controls from outside sources than you can shake a stick at.
Well, we are not supposed to believe "in" medicine or science. In fact, science--real science--is a PROCESS whereby we all can look objectively at a thing on the table in front of us and all assess the means of counting the parts of that thing or measuring its properties, and then come to a common conclusion.
What we need here is, first, a reformed system with sufficient bandwidth and an excess of receiver states to handle current volumes of information.
Then we need a revamped society with virtue in sufficient abundance and regarded as an inherent good to handle the early temptations to corrupt the new and improved, at least until the next civilizational crisis.
It is possible, but not without some---corrrrrrrecshun, which apparently--against our best efforts--is coming.
So true! The issue is systemic. The problem is not the pseudoscience but the people who inforce it, the people with power. The real issue is the use of power. Critical thinking does not appear overnight, it has to be educated, so we have to examine the education system as well and people with power have shaped this system as well to produce compliant subjects. Everything we see today is the result of a lengthy process, it did not happen suddenly.
Yes, that is the scientism ideal. Rarely ever achieved.
Who defines virtue?
Not trying to give you a hard time, honest. - I've experienced what I am talking about. Not from behind a desk with data and stats and a computer model, I lived it. And when I went looking for data and stats to support what I was being told, and found either none or bogus at best, bought and paid for 'science', I realized I was in trouble and I needed a way out of the hole I was in.
Ultimately, anyone who is suffering and doesn't know why, is going to go to an 'expert', a 'trusted medical professional' an 'authority' or 'specialist' in the allopathic medical industry seeking knowledgeable scientific help to 'heal' them. That is 'belief that', or 'trust in' those 'professionals' with the 'allowable and appropriate medical licenses'. Licenses are controlled by governments and pharmaceutical companies and enforced by insurance companies.
How can any medical professional, no matter how benevolent their intentions are, actually be free to use the scientific model as espoused by scientism?
Those trusted medical professionals, authorities, experts and specialists all must follow 'standards of care' protocols that their institutions, the government and insurance companies mandate to keep the practitioner insured and employed.
That is just one part of the bias and influence in the allopathic medicine model, no matter how well meaning or trusted the medical practitioner is. Don't even start to dig just a bit into the education (indoctrination) medical practitioners get. The firehose-in-the-mouth program is designed to make it almost impossible for students to critically think by the sheer magnitude of rote memorization that is required. And then they go into rotation where they are sleep deprived for years.
There is no healing in the allopathic medical model. Only symptom management, at best. Typically what transpires is a slippery slope of taking yet another pharmaceutical to maybe manage another symptom brought on by the previous pharmaceutical(s). The synergistic effects of multiple pharmaceuticals is largely not known. The contraindications that are known, are known because people suffered major adverse events AND they somehow got enough attention to get the issue looked into, typically years later.
No synergistic studies of the so-called childhood vaccines has ever been done. How is that 'scientific'? It's obviously not. And dare I say, it is the foundation of many of our diseases and poor health.
Thanks for reading. Have a wonderful day, get outside and get your hands and feet in the dirt and grown something. Peace.
I have had the exact same conversation with another online acquaintance who suffers a from a relatively rare, very painful and debilitating, neurological disease. He was initially frustrated that I had no solutions for him, even after researching the literature. I do not blame him. It is like having a piece of heavy equipment crushing your toe while everyone else is standing around drinking coffee, joking and laughing, completely oblivious to your screams.
It seems as though, just as in the case of biological systems of structure and function themselves, where these range from the simple to the very complex, so too do the problems that can occur in those systems. Guess which of these doctors are good at solving, in general. We are up against a rising mountain of the unknown that requires effort, energy, to extract the necessary details and develop hypotheses about. It is not simply that the doctors have not expended enough effort to page through their dusty books.
And then, imagine that that heavy machinery is still crushing your toe and, albeit someone paying attention to you, he says moronic things like I just did in the paragraph above.
Of course, sometimes there is a simple solution to what was masquerading as a complex problem, as in the case of sick boy at the center of the story depicted in the movie, 'Lorenzo's Oil'. There, the boy's father entered into the situation and engaged the problem and came up with the solution. I won't say that this case is "unique," because I do not want to discourage anyone from tackling their affliction on their own.
I have solved some of my own medical conditions this way---others not. This is not a bad way to go, even when we are not facing a corrupt medical system, or one that is simply inadequate.
We do not live in the right kind of society at present for the fostering of the kinds of doctors and scientists that you want and that you need. As ardent as I am about free markets, enterprise, discovery and innovation, I must confess that ours has become (sorry to keep using the same word), corrupted and unrecognizable as a moral, heroic, intellectually vibrant, curious and cooperative social and economic system. About the best thing the current system of rewards seems to make in another d---ed version of a cell phone that--to me--seems pretty much like the first cell phone for all practical purposes.
When I mentioned in an earlier reply, the concept of virtue, someone (I believe very sincerely) responded by asking me what virtue is. Well, THAT'S the problem. There was a time when people knew the answer to that question. Virtue is the four-leafed clover that our current world is good at looking over.
All other human endeavors degrade in their own merits thereafter---including the doing of science and the provision of medical care.
It's good that you mentioned Lorenzo's Oil, it is a very good example. In truth I believe most of the healing is individual, not mediated by the system, but what education does to all of us is obliterate our power to act individually towards that healing, as patients, as doctors etc. There will always be a Lorenzo's father to fight for his son, there will always be a Dr Sayer to fight for his patient Leonard in Awakenings, even to the point of becoming unpopular among his peers, but what the education and the society is doing is make us fewer and less equipped to do so. We still have the instinct to do it, they did not take that away yet, but not the instruments. So we are less likely to get a result.
It's true, allopathic medicine does not have the objective of healing people, as a system that is educated into doctors it cannot even have such an objective as healing would be subjective and difficult to measure and all systems are based on measurable outcomes. However, the real harm does not lie there, but in preventing doctors to help patients heal by any means possible. In modern time a physician is someone who undertakes the application of a number of procedures, the outcome does not even matter as long as the procedures were applied to the letter. If you define the system like this it is entirely obvious why the vast majority of doctors do not object to the damage Covid vaccines are doing. They respected the procedure and they were taught the outcome is not relevant. Generations of physicians were educated like this.
As for the patients, they were educated from generations not to know anything about their health and rely entirely on the medical system, so what choice do they really have now? They cannot even understand what is happening, it is completely understandable that they would prefer the blue pill, they have taken the same pill from generations, education has seen to that.
The way society shapes its members is not new, and it has an objective: that people are made easier to manage. It will continue to have this objective, it worked so far. The history is full of Bill Gates, he is just a bag of money, his existence was made possible by others who have vision and power. If he disappears tomorrow someone else will take his place in financing the vaccines and WHO and other instruments to use to make people more manageable.
Indeed. I loathe interacting with young physicians today. They are not so much physicians as they are Technicians, Grade III---and arrogant. They see themselves as the plungers in the Great Syringe administering--linearly and unidirectionally--the big come down from the "whoever it is to be obeyed."
I miss my childhood doctor, even though I sat in terror suspecting that he and my mother had conspired at some earlier point for the visit to end with a dreaded injection. He sat, puffing his pipe, listening to my mother absorbing the human detail. I do not know if it really significantly in our treatment, but he seemed to enjoy it. He had a back office visible through the door behind his clinic desk. It was filled with books, and I knew something curious happened because of those dark recesses of books filled with mysterious topics about our insides.
Given the unpredictably long stays in the waiting room with the entertainment being Highlighter magazines teaching youngsters pattern detection, it is reasonable to assume that everyone received such attention.
Horace Mann and John Dewey are the two marble statues in the nearly empty hall of my museum of educational influences. My father went to a Horace Mann elementary school in our neighborhood. Before I learned to read, my auditory learning had suggested to me that it was "horse-man" school. Reducing American youth to being obedient beasts of burden for the coming industrial revolution, in very places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the effect regardless of Mann's aspiration for advancing democracy.
It is interesting how so much that is done n the name of democracy winds up of robbing people of democracy. Dewey stands at the center of the hub of education, psychology and pragmatic philosophy. His circularizing of the stimulus-response mechanism was a correct one, and it was a forerunner of the cybernetic feedback system. Like all delightfully correct ideas, it would be misused--if not by those instrumental in their development--then by armies of near-nameless builders of intellectual pyramids dotting the deserts.
The building of cybernetic bureaucracies with hidden, interior tunnels and external additions and extensions that clawed their way into society was further enhanced--in Dave Schmitt's embarrassingly impoverished, flawed, private history of how things do not work--by neo-pragmatism. As is typical of such drab things advertised as "new and improved," neo-pragmatism, a.k.a. post-modernism and its associated depressive Richard Rorty, further propelled us toward the natural conclusions of another fatefully-embraced notion rooted in, as almost always, one-hundred years earlier.
Modernism brought a liberation from religion. Post-modernism brought a liberation form the idea of scientific truth. Fuse these with the cybernetic, managerial state and Voilà! COVID plus the subduing of bodily autonomy.
In 2009, leading up to the Obamacare rape of December 24 that year, I joined a lunchtime rally outside of another useless-Republican Congresswoman's office to demonstrate our disapproval of the proposed legislation. Offered the opportunity, I was the first to grab the bullhorn. I recounted for the crowd that the 60s and 70s had put into place an environmentalist culture. As a dumb college student, I did not share of flopping around like a captured fish in this rowboat. This type of captured and capturing environmentalism had gained control of our world from everywhere around us, right up to the surface of our skin.
I had just returned from a visit to my home town and I was stunned to see that the University of Pittsburgh had seemed to have captured just about every type of real estate market, not only medically-related ones. The U.S. Steel building was renamed UPMC. This was a telling, historical comment.
I then shared with the crowd my suspicion that the next step was being put into place: control of our bodies from the genes right up to the undersurface of our skin using the cybernetic power of total, cybernetic control of medical information.
So, what was left? Our skin? Not really, but figuratively. In the Deweyian transactional scheme, we were being offered whatever sexual (mostly) stimulation we chose. The possibilities explode, and not just in number. That was cheap and it did not cost the oligarchs anything to speak of. Thus, the signal emergence of "Rachel" Levine as secretary of America's medical tyranny.
Of humorous note, I recently needed a copy of my birth certificate. Naturally, the process of bureaucratic centralization is steadily progressing and county records are now held by the State. Lo and behold, whose signature is now on my birth certificate? Of course, "Rachel" Levine's. (So, is this fellow double dipping and still retaining his salary and position from the Commonwealth f Pennsylvania, I wonder?) I will frame it. It is a sign of my new rebirth.
Okay, too long again. It is your (of course, someone else's) fault.
The system has become so convoluted (while we unwittingly participated in their efforts to keep us distracted by anything and everything) that it has become impossible to stay on top of every bit of legislation or standard that has served to undermine good and decent society these past few decades. The WHO declared that vaccines don’t require genotoxic or carcinogenic studies in 2005? The way to introduce a gene therapy without raising any regulatory flags is to simply call it vaccine. Doesn’t quite fit the definition of vaccine? Change the definition of vaccine. Over and over and over. One thing I agree with these psychopaths about is the urgency to build back better. But my build back better plan is one in which there is a special place for the pseudo elites and their minions that broke decent society. And they’re not gonna like it.
I can really agree with your solution for the sociopaths who broke decent society for their own profit (Fauci chief among them) and the political hacks eager to jump on the bandwagon for personal power and profit. Obviously public is considered a group of sheep to be shown for resources and lies to in as many ways as to continue the system
They hope now, with the aid of the CCP (long accustomed to manipulating large groups) to a even better arrangement for oligarchy and increased profit and to get rid of pesky individual liberties in making the bulk of mankind slaves "you'll own nothing but be happy"
And we thought witchcraft was an old, ancient practice. Witches exit stage left and the allopathic medical model enters stage right. The Greek root word for 'pharma-' is sorceries. Huh, go figure.
God, yes. The same type of statistical shenanigans is used by the climate changers, leading to "statistical significance" in various temperature changes that are not justified by the underlying measurements.
That is so true! This is going to be the new vaccine frenzy, climate change. We are probably all going to have to calculate the carbon footprint for everything we do and pay for it
Yes, they continue to change "temperatures" in order to (in one famous case) to "hide the increase" in the 1600's AD warming period because it didnt fit the "narrative". Lock them up for mankind's peace of mind and to stop their opportunistic lying before they deliberately reduce society to the period before the age of coal and oil
It is sham statistics, baked in with some watered-down 101 Critical Thinking lessons, and a pinch of cognitive science research into biases of reasoning.
Trying to define evidence on the fly without any serious questioning of where and why standards of evidence ARE standards leaves us with... well, everything since 2020.
"evidence-based medicine" which should be renamed "rules of thumb if you don't have time for real math".
Give them Hell to the nth power. It is a much needed focus that will no doubt be a masterpiece. Betcha a nickle it can disrupt a far broader swath of government supported "science" where the jokes about Enron accounting ring true.
Math is a tool to manipulate mathematically "challenged" people (for their own good, of course, or "for the children", or an even "better" excuse, for the "earth")
Very well put. In fact, the "evidence-based medicine" platitude smacks of the US's "rules-based-order." Both are anything but and beg the questions, "whose evidence?" and "whose rules?"
More "weasal" words to avoid debate with generally credulous (naive) people.
Like Obamacare is the ACA and vote rigging bill is a "American voting rights act" or whatever ironical name to obscure real purpose (which ISNT one person, one vote) like CS Lewis said, that when fascism arrives it will be cloaked in "anti-fascism" disguise
The quote of which you comment wasn't from CS Lewis. It's been attributed for years to Sinclair Lewis but the Sinclair Lewis Library has said it is not a Sinclair Lewis quote. It's interesting that the same quote, in a few iterations, has been attributed to many people. None of them appear to be supported. The closest I've seen, that I know is true, was a 1975 comment from Ronald Reagan who said, "When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of Liberalism".
When I'm done with high priority tasks, I will be writing up some articles that show mathematically that the pyramid of evidence is a sham. It's not based on mathematics. It's statistics used inappropriately all over the place, and especially in the area called "evidence-based medicine" which should be renamed "rules of thumb if you don't have time for real math".
Most of the fields of biomedical and epidemiological math are not defensible as statistics. They are scarcely better than psychology, which is a real topic of course, but for which statistics can only usually be used to build on assumptions, not like the harder sciences.
Isn't it interesting how the "pyramid of evidence" goes from lowest-cost, most readily available types evidence gathering up to something only the "elites" in the scientific community are "allowed" to do?
It's almost like the pyramid is more a justification for control than anything else.
It's sure taking awhile for the peddlers of commercialised nonsense to be brought to heel. That it would take a mountain of bodies was not unimaginable, given that the simplest of distinctions such as that made between statistical and clinical significance are now beyond the ken of most, and the political mode of demarcation, the precautionary principle is rooted scientivism dogma and modeling that fuels the pressitutes and monstrously overpaid public health risk mongers alike.
'The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge' (2016)
I am always going to return to my old saws: (1) science, 'qua' science, viz., "good" science (what other kind would you want) is not the problem, it is part of the solution; (2) most of what people are (rightfully) complaining about is NOT science: it is technology---there is a huge step there where in the introduction of more anti-human meddling can occur; (3) science needs to be properly situated in a broader philosophical framework. In universities, for practical reasons, courses in philosophy are listed in the catalogs along with advanced microeconomic analysis and European history1800-1913. But philosophy should be an encompassing discipline, not a side-by-side, menu item.
Don't worry, I have a feeling that I will be repeating this.
Sort of like the 'problems' of free speech (and capitalism). There may be and are 'problems', but most are 'fixed' by more free speech (and more real capitalism). Hell of a lot better than centralized government, and a command economy. And the modern idea of 'community rights' over individual rights, is total BS. We don't live as communities, we live as individuals.
Agreed, Richard A. Yes. I would say that what poses as capitalism at the moment--this weird private-public partnership of lawless rulemaking, surveillance and coercion (the private part, e.g., Larry Fink, George Soros), backed up by biases judges and the gun (the public part, e.g., Merrick Garland, Gavin Newsome)--is not capitalism. Thus, I think, what you meant by your qualifier: "real."
I would also like to see an appreciation for, not just free speech and not just free debate (where goodwill cannot necessarily be assumed), but an uncodifiable thing: free and genuine conversation. We have to be educated into that and into the idea that real politics is, as Aristotle said, the art of friendship. But then, they almost killed him just like they killed his mentor's mentor. Apparently, real conversation is just too painful for some folks to tolerate. In the upside-down world, being weighed down with all sorts of ugly baggage allows the unprincipled to float to the top.
...and let's not forget our beloved food pyramid of the 50s and 60s that was endorsed by the food companies that encouraged us to eat lots of carbs and especially sugar for that energy boost.
I remember that, and that trans fats were supposed to be better. Turns out that that was wrong too, at one point, the one single thing that you could do to improve your health was STOP eating trans fats.
They've been wrong a LOT regarding diet. Everything my grandmother did, eating buttered toast and eggs and bacon everyday, only enabled her to live to 94.
Correction Steve. Those pyramids were not endorsed by the food companies. They were CREATED by the food companies and endorsed by the government!
Good call! Been a long time since I read Omnivore's Delimma.
In logic class, I learned the simple rule:
If A = B, and B = C, then A = C.
Have shared this reasoning with many over the last 2 years. Comes in handy when talking about vaccine injury and other things.
Must everything be so complicated? Critical thinking for the win!
Can you spell out for me how you apply this to vaccine injury? Always looking for better ways to inform people.
The A = B approach arose because it was too much to continue to hear the v injured speak the languaging similiar to "commonality does not imply causality" as a "disclaimer" ...it was if they had to learn the "speak" in order to be taken even somewhat seriously and not be censored, bashed, etc for speaking up. And we clearly all know these injuries aren't "anxiety".
Here's the example:
(A) Someone gets the shot and (B) there's a health issue that happens afterwards
(B) The health issue that happened afterwords is (C) a new issue, something weird or different, an old issue that's resurfaced, etc
Therefore, (A) Because someone got the shot, the (C) new issue, etc is caused by the shot - v injury
This approach has worked for me. Sometimes I follow up with if it looks like a duck and smells like a duck, it's a duck.
#RealNotRare
The closer the 'injury' happens (time wise) after the vaccine, the closer the correlation. Let me know if you disagree. (everything else being the same)
And over all mortality has been going up after the 'vaccines' started. All kinds of things, not just what you might expect. It's a very large percentage too, you might have already heard about it. Life insurance companies have been complaining.
Also the records regarding military members have gone up a LOT too. And the obvious lies and clumsy changes of the statistics have not helped to convince people (at least me) either.
hmm, I'm interested in that too. I can see how you could say something like
(A)vax_spike ~= (B) virus spike*
(B)virus_spike = (C)harm
(A)vax_spike = (C) harm
*(they are not exactly the same, the vax spike is closed conformation, but is still able to bind to ACE-2. from the cell paper they showed higher levels of spike in vax blood than in that of an acute infection)
Also for the clinical trial just using a basic algebra ...
without any intervention we expect the all cause serious adverse events to be about the same in the test and control group of a Random Control Trial
baseline_test = baseline_control
after intervention we expect the all cause serious adverse events to be *statistically* less in the test group vs. the control group
baseline_test < baseline_control + unprevented_covid_hospitalizations
This is not what the pfizer trial showed. For all cause serious adverse events(requiring medical intervention) the outcomes were about the same for both groups.
Here I'm assuming that vaccine caused harm is how the equation gets balanced, but maybe there is some other reason or possibly the trial was not done well and
the control group was much more healthy.
baseline_test + vaccine_caused_hospitalizations = baseline_control + unprevented_covid_hospitalizations
assuming the baselines are equal we can remove those from each side of the equation
vaccine_caused_hospitalizations = unprevented_covid_hospitalization
please point out if I've gotten something wrong. I've tried this reasoning with pro-vax groups and they always come back at me with something like how I can't expect the vaccine to prevent someone from getting a kidney infection.
And the fact that the control group was eliminated, does not build confidence. In fact, it convinces me of mens rea, which is obvious evidence AGAINST the 'vaccines' (definition of vaccine had to be changed, removing the word 'immunity' to the word 'helps' instead. That should REALLY raise people's suspicions, IMO)
If you want to study a classic government scam - study the requirement for preoperative beta blocker use prior to cardiac surgery. It was put into place with minimal evidence from a poorly designed trial, then evidence has mounted that the use is harmful, then the government keeps it in place for 10 plus more years. Thats why I have no confidence that they will remove vaccine mandates any time soon.
Similar situation in the use of X-ray on women’s pelvises to determine if they could give birth. Which in and of its self was ridiculous given the levels of relaxin in her body and the fact that the human head is design to mould during delivery. The doctor who discovered that this was exposing babies to radiation and they were developing cancer was very concerned about doing follow up research quickly because she assumed these exposed children would soon not be available to use for research. This assumption was driven by the idea that the use of X-ray in delivery would be stopped… except it didn’t happen. It continued to be used for at least a decade more. Who do you know today who would not scoff at the idea of using X-ray on a pregnant women?
I worked for a wholesale loan company that was embarrassed when a fico number came out to be a whole number, so they routinely modified them to look more credible.
In Engineering, we used to call 'rule of thumb'....SWAG: Scientific Wild Ass Guess.
Naw, Matthew. You put on ruby slippers, click your heals 3 times, and - voila! - p = .049.
I basically have a doctorate in theoretical stats, and I cringe at med stats. I look forward to your analysis.
Thank you, Mathew. That will be a real contribution. I am sure you are aware of literature showing that must, if not most, reporting of medical research is unreliable (to put it politely). To be fair, measurement in biological sciences is fraught with difficulties, real-world challenges to the central limit theorem, that measuring, say, the characteristics of a laser beam or the tensile strength of a steel wire, are not subjected too.
However, there are real possibilities for improving what is within the power of the human experimenter to accomplish. I am thinking of types of studies, like from a physiology department, involving sample sizes of six. Yikes! This is not unusual when the experiments involve large animal surgery and are expensive. As you know, there is a direct way of determining the necessary sample size, but one needs to feed a good estimate of expected variability into that equation for iterative production of a result. I suspect some overly generous estimating going on there.
I have never produced metanalyses myself. They make me uneasy. In terms of reforming science, I would like to see the funding agencies and regulators recombined for assessing the grunt-work studies. These would comprise reviewers and specialists who could farm out proposed verification experiments.
These types of experiments, "studies," would be those not generally considered to be the kind involving ideas and mechanisms that would likely get one a Nobel Prize, but they need to be done. These would be the types of research (literally, 're-' + 'searching') that pharmaceutical developers need to do to establish safety and efficacy.
Rather than a hodgepodge of methodologies used by labs with tendentious interests, perhaps university laboratories could apply or bid on these put up as offering by the central agency. We may need government researchers doing the tests in the lab, getting "wet" so to speak, not merely reviewing submissions.
I can hear the protests of expense. To this I reply, "How much was spent on shutting down the economic systems of the world on very bad science?"
The farming out of these kinds of studies would mandate the exact procedure. It would be brutally uncreative work for the laboratorians. But this is precisely the kind of rigidity that is supposed to be practiced in hospital laboratories. There are people who are actually ideally suited for this type of work. They delight in a well-analyzed job. They enjoy methodology and the challenges of a tight and reproducible signal-to-noise ratio.
This would also be a great opportunity for graduate students to learn the craft of doing a variety of experiments, laboratory discipline, patience and detailed knowledge of the reagents, analytical instruments, material science and statistical methods that are presently skimmed over in the rush-job world that our present economy demands. It is almost as though people popping out of college with relevant degrees would "work in the vineyards" before going on to degree-granting programs. Or perhaps it could be worked into a revised version of the, now somewheres obsolescent, stage of the master's degree.
This would be a system set apart from the funding/granting of fundamental, novel and highly-creative research into physical and biological mechanisms. Admission into such programs could take applicants from the "Research Corps" as I fancifully played with above, but these advanced programs would primarily take those students who by the end of high school or university have displayed extremes of intellect and capacity for fertile scientific thought.
Just some fragmentary thoughts having read your comment. I only suggest these ideas to get the discussion going---not as a well-worked out plan.
David, speaking as a physical methods experimental chemist, virtually every measurement is subject to systematic errors that violate the assumptions of the central limit theorem.
There's an irreducible lower limit of deterministic uncertainty that never averages away. Hence the critical need for instrumental calibration; an experimental necessity that is often neglected.
In AGW consensus climate science, for example, calibration is not only ignored it's not even understood.
[Oops, I seem to have lost another response in progress. Here we go again.]
Pat, thanks. Spoken like a true, physical methods experimental chemist! This is an interesting theoretical query.
Systematic error (and its subset, instrumental error) does not alter the shape of a Normal Distribution, the population mean (mu) nor the variance or its square root (sigma). These are the properties of Nature.
Rather, systematic error shifts the sample mean (x-bar) with preservation of the sample standard deviation.
For example, on a day with steady wind, a systematic error, unless corrected for, will act on bullets traveling toward a target equally, adding a systematic bias. The cluster of bullets holes produced by an otherwise expert marksman will--under such uncorrected conditions--be deflected to one side of the bullseye by the degree of systematic influence. Accuracy will be degraded, not precision.
As another example, teachers adding some equal number of points to every student's test score are making a systematic adjustment. [By the way, this is not a true "curving" of the scores.]
In nature, collections of even similar things, members of a set, nonetheless vary in counts and measurements of these things, despite--collectively--their having a mean value. The collected sizes of the variation tend to produce distributions that are normal and whose bell-curve shape--for the general reader--can be completely determined by the population mean and the standard deviation. This produces an awe-inspiring fixity, as I see it. Otherwise, nothing would have any meaning. A hydrogen atom could have a range of sizes from 1/1,000,000th it accepted size to that of the size of Jupiter. It would be a psychotic world of sensory data that the mind could not apprehend. It would be a world where a grasshopper could chase a lion and women could be men.
The coalescence of measurements about a value that is the mean represents an underlying, normative (lawful) aspect of nature. Every discipline ending in the suffix, 'logy' (from, Gr., "logos") reflects its self-aware effort to understand the order of the universe ("An end to the means!" Haha. Gee, that was a shamefully-nerdy attempt at humor and cleverness.)
As you are aware, the statisticians refer to this piling up of measurements at the mean a consequence or restatement of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). The piling up of measurements results from the additive effects of all the factors that can cause measurements of a single property to deviate from the mean, both large and small factors, and factors that both tend to locate an individual measurement above or below the true, population mean.
It is recognized that, in the biological disciplines, there is more variability of measurements. In many cases, the assumption of a normal curve following the descriptive Gaussian equation (https://academo.org/demos/gaussian-distribution/) does not hold, although there may be a clustering of values within the space of possibilities: it is just that a nice, bell curve is not followed.
This misbehavior, if you will, of biological systems upon measurement is described as being due to the set of factors that produce deviations above and below the mean. It is a rougher assortment of sizes of these "buffeting" factors around the mean. This is why non-parametric statistical methods often are resorted to when dealing with biological data. "Non-parametric" properties--and tests for the same--do not assume the same "lawfulness of shape" of the distribution as in the case of the normal, bell curve.
I think, Pat, that the point of difference here is that you, as a laboratory chemist, are focused on MEASURED values, almost always samples of the population (or, universe). Measurements typically involve instruments and instruments unavoidable introduce deviations into the flow of information.
But instruments tend to introduce both noisy errors above and below the means (affecting sample stardard deviations but not means), as well as systematic, unidirectional errors (affecting means and not standard deviations). Restated, systematic and instrumental errors affect sample measurements, not the population characteristics and, again, sample means (x-bar).
Additionally, the distinction between much of biological systems and physical systems is that biological systems are less lawful than physical systems (broadly speaking, of course) and that normality tends to be more degraded towards non-parametric behavior not only of sampled, measured values and their means and standard deviations (x-bar and s-bar, resp.), but also of their POPULATION means and standard deviations (mu and sigma, resp.). Put another way, the Central Limit Theorem in many biological systems is challenged, unlike in many physical systems.
This is a partial explanation why physical laboratorians, versus biological laboratorians, can produce "cleaner" data and why, to be merciful, the biological scientists often have a more difficult time at some levels of analysis of their phenomena of interest.
I have had the benefit (and the curse) of working with both physical and biological phenomena on the same project. Characterizing the physical stimuli, for instance, is a charmed task compared to accomplishing the same with the output response of the biological system.
In summary, systematic, including instrumental, error does not alter the lawfulness of population means and their population standard deviations (features of Nature herself), only sample means. This is not only not a challenge to the Central Limit Theorem (CLT), but it reinforces its reality.
In Biology the factors producing variation degrade the lawful, normative expression of the CLT and--in acting upon the population mean and standard deviation, also alter our window into the population means via sampling---and even the strength of the assumption of the normal curve.
David, you wrote, "Systematic error (and its subset, instrumental error) does not alter the shape of a Normal Distribution..."
Yes, it does. In a specific example, every single published air temperature sensor field calibration experiment of which I'm aware, has produced a non-normal error distribution. Typically skewed warm.
When the error is due to uncontrolled environmental variables, the mean, empirical standard deviation, and distribution are all time-wise inconstant.
You wrote, “Rather, systematic error shifts the sample mean (x-bar) with preservation of the sample standard deviation.”
Your argument assumes a constant influence throughout, e.g., a steady wind. One invariably sees this claim in statistical treatments of error.
In experimental reality, the condition of a constant offset error is rarely if ever true. Each measurement has its own bias offset error. But when the uncontrolled variables are inconstant, the bias offset error changes with each measurement. As the true value is always unknown, the magnitude of the bias offset is always unknown. Hence the need for a calibration experiment against a reference standard. In your shooter example, the bullseye is a known. In experimental science, the bullseye is unknown.
In field calibrations of air temperature sensors, the calibration standard is typically an aspirated sensor. These are usually accurate to ±0.1 C. Solar irradiance and wind speed are not constant. Measurement errors are not constant. The error distributions of hundreds to thousands of measurements, each taken mere minutes apart, are not normal. And the error means also vary from time-to-time.
See, for example, the error distributions in Huwald, et al., (2009) “Albedo effect on radiative errors in air temperature measurements” https://doi.org/10.1029/2008WR007600
These field calibrations typically include thousands of measurements. Were the error populations normal, there are enough measurements to produce the Gaussian distribution. But normal distributions do not appear because the uncontrolled environmental variables impacting the sensor are themselves non-random. In Winter, for example, the radiation screen can become clogged on one side with snow. Or not. Or more snow or less from Winter to Winter and from week to week in a given Winter.
In my professional work in X-ray absorption spectroscopy, we never assumed constant offsets or normal distributions for systematic measurement error. We paid strict attention to that problem.
One of the uncontrolled variables was heating of the single-crystal monochromator by the X-ray beam. This causes drift of unknown magnitude in X-ray energy. Monochromators are now liquid-nitrogen cooled. This has resolved much of that problem. But others remain significant such as sample homogeneity, data normalization and calibration errors (often sample-dependent) among others. Total error is the sum of all these errors; each one of unknown magnitude. The parent populations of such errors are unlikely to be normally distributed.
The outcome of refractory uncertainty is not as dire as you make out. Hard work and attention to detail can reduce but not entirely eliminate systematic error and its resultant uncertainty. Ultimately, the lower limit of uncertainty is the always finite instrumental resolution. If residual uncertainty is small relative to the quantity measured, one has a good handle on knowledge.
Your example of the hydrogen atom is a bit ironic because the electron occupancy becomes unity only at infinity. In principle the electron orbital of a hydrogen atom fills the entire universe.
The CLT only tells one the mean of a distribution. It does not change the shape of the distribution.
I recently read James & Fox (1972).” Comparative Sea-surface Temperature measurements (WMO-No. 336): Results of a programme of comparative measurements conducted under the auspices of the Commission for Marine Meteorology (5),” a truly excellent piece of work.
In dealing with systematic error in sea surface measurements, they note that, “Systematic differences are associated with the accuracy of the instruments used and, if a bias is identified, corrections made to reduce the differences. … In any case, the correction would only reduce the difference in temperatures measured by two different procedures, and would not improve the accuracy of the observation.”
The CLT permits correction of a bias. It does not normalize a distribution or improve accuracy.
This quantitative modesty is a rigorous standard in experimental physical science. How can one even correct a mean bias when the true magnitude is unknown?
When a calibration experiment reveals a non-normal error distribution, one lives with it if one can, e.g., <±10% of the measurement mean, and applies the empirical standard deviation as an uncertainty attached to every measurement.
It’s nice to live in a world where errors are restricted to electronic noise and known offsets. But in the world of experimental physical science, that is rarely if ever true.
Patrick, and those in the general audience still interested "drilled down" technical point---maybe not many.
I believe you are making my point for me. My point was that there in more inherent variability and tendency to deviate from normality in many (of course, not all) biological systems than in many (of course, not all) purely physical systems under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the distribution may not infrequently be multimodal.
The better example for the physical system--as I want to make my point--would be the data from the manufacturer's development or QC procedures for the temperature sensors you are using. Skewing actually does not present as serious a problem in testing normal distributions as one might think (means of means).
The measurement of temperature sensors under uncontrolled field conditions approaches some of the very characteristics that biological systems do. Thus, your example, though abiotic, deviates from the more ideal cases of measuring single physical characteristics 'ceteris paribus', all other things being equal (constant). The wind (which is obviously not the output of a temperature sensor, is an external factor that adds, especially in the short term, some very unbalanced factors (e.g., gusts).
But, the underlying physical behavior of the sensor, even if somewhat skewed for some technical reason involving--I don't know--a thermistor circuit or something, should be smoothly lawful. THAT is what our imagined example actually involves. That is wherein lies the true mean value. Your taking it into the field produces the actual measured situation about which, 'vis-a-vis' the sensor's behavior as the principal figure of merit, there is no "true" combined-factor behavior.
I got it, you are measuring temperature behavior. The sensor is merely the device which you would like to treat as a true reporter or values---but that does not model well the point that I was trying to make about the behavior of biological systems. Your climatic conditions in the field, again, comes closer to the biological systems in the distribution of their true values as well as their measured values.
Hi David -- you might want to take a look at the errors due to self-heating in electronic temperature sensors in Lin, & Hubbard (2004) "Sensor and Electronic Biases/Errors in Air Temperature Measurements in Common Weather Station Networks" https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0426(2004)021<1025:SAEEIA>2.0.CO;2
The problem is never simple. Gusts today, still air tomorrow. Instrumental behavior is always lawful in that its physics is always followed. But a normal distribution of errors is rarely a good assumption in the physical sciences, unless one is very fortunate. Using a well-engineered instrument, i.e., a mature measurement system, it's possible that measurement errors have been reduced to negligible. But negligible doesn't mean normal.
In any case, I understand your point. Thanks for the conversation. :-)
Patrick, you bet! That was fun. We probably played out the conversation beyond what is of general interest now at Steve's site. It is probably time to get back to COVID, pseudovaccines and the systems-theoretical problems that produced that.
I plan to do some thermal measurements as part of a medical research project. I will take special note of the reference that you send.
So, I think I would treat the sensor in the controlled, laboratory situation of the engineer and climate scientist as providing the best estimate (x-bar) of the true mean (mu). Then the field work adds all the variable factors---but in your case, THAT is actually what you are interested in. You are interested in the sources of perturbation! On top of that, if I envision correctly the challenge that faces you, you need to be able to at least record these separate perturbing factors separately to be able to study them.
Again, that was fun!
But AGW uses magic math! It allows better accuracy than the instruments in places that weren't even measured! It'll even open stuck jars, cook a whole chicken, and make an entire fishing rod fit in your pocket!
If you act now, you'll get two for the price of one!
The combined Vatican and CDC of the AGW crowd is the UN IPCC and their report in April of last year was eagerly anticipated. Oopsie, however, because when the report came out they were forced to say QUOTE "ALL of our 73 models are running way too hot".
So sure enough, the follow up UN IPCC WGII-6 report that came out a few weeks ago contained the money shot, for those who were listening, QUOTE: "The historic focus on scientific literature has been increasingly supplanted by emphases on social justice, equity, and climate justice."
Translation: None of the science supports our conclusions.
These should be considered in the same light as the religious wars of the past, the expenditure of vast sums of money and human lives in the service of an ideology. The War On The Weather is an especially egregious example of this, where vast sums will be stolen and misdirected in the service of their religious belief system, but it will be completely impossible to determine whether any "progress" is being made. At least in The Crusades they could count the bodies of dead Muslims on the battlefield...
"Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections"
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
Climate models have no predictive value. Air temperature projection uncertainty for CMIP5 and CMIP6 models is about ±15 C at 2100.
Their air temperature projections have no physical meaning.
In my every single encounter with climate modelers -- now more than 2 dozen -- they've displayed no understanding of physical error analysis.
Commentary here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/24/are-climate-modelers-scientists/
They're literally untrained to evaluate the reliability of their own models. And hostile to any directed discussion.
Which is why things are such a mess. That and the active collusion of the American Physical Society.
"Rather than a hodgepodge of methodologies used by labs with tendentious interests, perhaps university laboratories could apply or bid on these put up as offering by the central agency."
Universities are not unbiased. They are funded by special interests and I believe the largest is the pharmaceutical industry.
Not to be cynical, but the entire allopathic medical industry is fraught with more assumptions and controls from outside sources than you can shake a stick at.
I don't know why we keep 'believing' in it.
Well, we are not supposed to believe "in" medicine or science. In fact, science--real science--is a PROCESS whereby we all can look objectively at a thing on the table in front of us and all assess the means of counting the parts of that thing or measuring its properties, and then come to a common conclusion.
What we need here is, first, a reformed system with sufficient bandwidth and an excess of receiver states to handle current volumes of information.
Then we need a revamped society with virtue in sufficient abundance and regarded as an inherent good to handle the early temptations to corrupt the new and improved, at least until the next civilizational crisis.
It is possible, but not without some---corrrrrrrecshun, which apparently--against our best efforts--is coming.
So true! The issue is systemic. The problem is not the pseudoscience but the people who inforce it, the people with power. The real issue is the use of power. Critical thinking does not appear overnight, it has to be educated, so we have to examine the education system as well and people with power have shaped this system as well to produce compliant subjects. Everything we see today is the result of a lengthy process, it did not happen suddenly.
Yes, that is the scientism ideal. Rarely ever achieved.
Who defines virtue?
Not trying to give you a hard time, honest. - I've experienced what I am talking about. Not from behind a desk with data and stats and a computer model, I lived it. And when I went looking for data and stats to support what I was being told, and found either none or bogus at best, bought and paid for 'science', I realized I was in trouble and I needed a way out of the hole I was in.
Ultimately, anyone who is suffering and doesn't know why, is going to go to an 'expert', a 'trusted medical professional' an 'authority' or 'specialist' in the allopathic medical industry seeking knowledgeable scientific help to 'heal' them. That is 'belief that', or 'trust in' those 'professionals' with the 'allowable and appropriate medical licenses'. Licenses are controlled by governments and pharmaceutical companies and enforced by insurance companies.
How can any medical professional, no matter how benevolent their intentions are, actually be free to use the scientific model as espoused by scientism?
Those trusted medical professionals, authorities, experts and specialists all must follow 'standards of care' protocols that their institutions, the government and insurance companies mandate to keep the practitioner insured and employed.
That is just one part of the bias and influence in the allopathic medicine model, no matter how well meaning or trusted the medical practitioner is. Don't even start to dig just a bit into the education (indoctrination) medical practitioners get. The firehose-in-the-mouth program is designed to make it almost impossible for students to critically think by the sheer magnitude of rote memorization that is required. And then they go into rotation where they are sleep deprived for years.
There is no healing in the allopathic medical model. Only symptom management, at best. Typically what transpires is a slippery slope of taking yet another pharmaceutical to maybe manage another symptom brought on by the previous pharmaceutical(s). The synergistic effects of multiple pharmaceuticals is largely not known. The contraindications that are known, are known because people suffered major adverse events AND they somehow got enough attention to get the issue looked into, typically years later.
No synergistic studies of the so-called childhood vaccines has ever been done. How is that 'scientific'? It's obviously not. And dare I say, it is the foundation of many of our diseases and poor health.
Thanks for reading. Have a wonderful day, get outside and get your hands and feet in the dirt and grown something. Peace.
What you say is true.
I have had the exact same conversation with another online acquaintance who suffers a from a relatively rare, very painful and debilitating, neurological disease. He was initially frustrated that I had no solutions for him, even after researching the literature. I do not blame him. It is like having a piece of heavy equipment crushing your toe while everyone else is standing around drinking coffee, joking and laughing, completely oblivious to your screams.
It seems as though, just as in the case of biological systems of structure and function themselves, where these range from the simple to the very complex, so too do the problems that can occur in those systems. Guess which of these doctors are good at solving, in general. We are up against a rising mountain of the unknown that requires effort, energy, to extract the necessary details and develop hypotheses about. It is not simply that the doctors have not expended enough effort to page through their dusty books.
And then, imagine that that heavy machinery is still crushing your toe and, albeit someone paying attention to you, he says moronic things like I just did in the paragraph above.
Of course, sometimes there is a simple solution to what was masquerading as a complex problem, as in the case of sick boy at the center of the story depicted in the movie, 'Lorenzo's Oil'. There, the boy's father entered into the situation and engaged the problem and came up with the solution. I won't say that this case is "unique," because I do not want to discourage anyone from tackling their affliction on their own.
I have solved some of my own medical conditions this way---others not. This is not a bad way to go, even when we are not facing a corrupt medical system, or one that is simply inadequate.
We do not live in the right kind of society at present for the fostering of the kinds of doctors and scientists that you want and that you need. As ardent as I am about free markets, enterprise, discovery and innovation, I must confess that ours has become (sorry to keep using the same word), corrupted and unrecognizable as a moral, heroic, intellectually vibrant, curious and cooperative social and economic system. About the best thing the current system of rewards seems to make in another d---ed version of a cell phone that--to me--seems pretty much like the first cell phone for all practical purposes.
When I mentioned in an earlier reply, the concept of virtue, someone (I believe very sincerely) responded by asking me what virtue is. Well, THAT'S the problem. There was a time when people knew the answer to that question. Virtue is the four-leafed clover that our current world is good at looking over.
All other human endeavors degrade in their own merits thereafter---including the doing of science and the provision of medical care.
It's good that you mentioned Lorenzo's Oil, it is a very good example. In truth I believe most of the healing is individual, not mediated by the system, but what education does to all of us is obliterate our power to act individually towards that healing, as patients, as doctors etc. There will always be a Lorenzo's father to fight for his son, there will always be a Dr Sayer to fight for his patient Leonard in Awakenings, even to the point of becoming unpopular among his peers, but what the education and the society is doing is make us fewer and less equipped to do so. We still have the instinct to do it, they did not take that away yet, but not the instruments. So we are less likely to get a result.
It's true, allopathic medicine does not have the objective of healing people, as a system that is educated into doctors it cannot even have such an objective as healing would be subjective and difficult to measure and all systems are based on measurable outcomes. However, the real harm does not lie there, but in preventing doctors to help patients heal by any means possible. In modern time a physician is someone who undertakes the application of a number of procedures, the outcome does not even matter as long as the procedures were applied to the letter. If you define the system like this it is entirely obvious why the vast majority of doctors do not object to the damage Covid vaccines are doing. They respected the procedure and they were taught the outcome is not relevant. Generations of physicians were educated like this.
As for the patients, they were educated from generations not to know anything about their health and rely entirely on the medical system, so what choice do they really have now? They cannot even understand what is happening, it is completely understandable that they would prefer the blue pill, they have taken the same pill from generations, education has seen to that.
The way society shapes its members is not new, and it has an objective: that people are made easier to manage. It will continue to have this objective, it worked so far. The history is full of Bill Gates, he is just a bag of money, his existence was made possible by others who have vision and power. If he disappears tomorrow someone else will take his place in financing the vaccines and WHO and other instruments to use to make people more manageable.
Indeed. I loathe interacting with young physicians today. They are not so much physicians as they are Technicians, Grade III---and arrogant. They see themselves as the plungers in the Great Syringe administering--linearly and unidirectionally--the big come down from the "whoever it is to be obeyed."
I miss my childhood doctor, even though I sat in terror suspecting that he and my mother had conspired at some earlier point for the visit to end with a dreaded injection. He sat, puffing his pipe, listening to my mother absorbing the human detail. I do not know if it really significantly in our treatment, but he seemed to enjoy it. He had a back office visible through the door behind his clinic desk. It was filled with books, and I knew something curious happened because of those dark recesses of books filled with mysterious topics about our insides.
Given the unpredictably long stays in the waiting room with the entertainment being Highlighter magazines teaching youngsters pattern detection, it is reasonable to assume that everyone received such attention.
Horace Mann and John Dewey are the two marble statues in the nearly empty hall of my museum of educational influences. My father went to a Horace Mann elementary school in our neighborhood. Before I learned to read, my auditory learning had suggested to me that it was "horse-man" school. Reducing American youth to being obedient beasts of burden for the coming industrial revolution, in very places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the effect regardless of Mann's aspiration for advancing democracy.
It is interesting how so much that is done n the name of democracy winds up of robbing people of democracy. Dewey stands at the center of the hub of education, psychology and pragmatic philosophy. His circularizing of the stimulus-response mechanism was a correct one, and it was a forerunner of the cybernetic feedback system. Like all delightfully correct ideas, it would be misused--if not by those instrumental in their development--then by armies of near-nameless builders of intellectual pyramids dotting the deserts.
The building of cybernetic bureaucracies with hidden, interior tunnels and external additions and extensions that clawed their way into society was further enhanced--in Dave Schmitt's embarrassingly impoverished, flawed, private history of how things do not work--by neo-pragmatism. As is typical of such drab things advertised as "new and improved," neo-pragmatism, a.k.a. post-modernism and its associated depressive Richard Rorty, further propelled us toward the natural conclusions of another fatefully-embraced notion rooted in, as almost always, one-hundred years earlier.
Modernism brought a liberation from religion. Post-modernism brought a liberation form the idea of scientific truth. Fuse these with the cybernetic, managerial state and Voilà! COVID plus the subduing of bodily autonomy.
In 2009, leading up to the Obamacare rape of December 24 that year, I joined a lunchtime rally outside of another useless-Republican Congresswoman's office to demonstrate our disapproval of the proposed legislation. Offered the opportunity, I was the first to grab the bullhorn. I recounted for the crowd that the 60s and 70s had put into place an environmentalist culture. As a dumb college student, I did not share of flopping around like a captured fish in this rowboat. This type of captured and capturing environmentalism had gained control of our world from everywhere around us, right up to the surface of our skin.
I had just returned from a visit to my home town and I was stunned to see that the University of Pittsburgh had seemed to have captured just about every type of real estate market, not only medically-related ones. The U.S. Steel building was renamed UPMC. This was a telling, historical comment.
I then shared with the crowd my suspicion that the next step was being put into place: control of our bodies from the genes right up to the undersurface of our skin using the cybernetic power of total, cybernetic control of medical information.
So, what was left? Our skin? Not really, but figuratively. In the Deweyian transactional scheme, we were being offered whatever sexual (mostly) stimulation we chose. The possibilities explode, and not just in number. That was cheap and it did not cost the oligarchs anything to speak of. Thus, the signal emergence of "Rachel" Levine as secretary of America's medical tyranny.
Of humorous note, I recently needed a copy of my birth certificate. Naturally, the process of bureaucratic centralization is steadily progressing and county records are now held by the State. Lo and behold, whose signature is now on my birth certificate? Of course, "Rachel" Levine's. (So, is this fellow double dipping and still retaining his salary and position from the Commonwealth f Pennsylvania, I wonder?) I will frame it. It is a sign of my new rebirth.
Okay, too long again. It is your (of course, someone else's) fault.
'much', not "most." Sorry
Just FYI, you can edit your comment by clicking on the little dots under it. I think there's a time limit, but not sure how long that is.
Thanks! I'll have an opportunity to try it out soon, I am sure.
The system has become so convoluted (while we unwittingly participated in their efforts to keep us distracted by anything and everything) that it has become impossible to stay on top of every bit of legislation or standard that has served to undermine good and decent society these past few decades. The WHO declared that vaccines don’t require genotoxic or carcinogenic studies in 2005? The way to introduce a gene therapy without raising any regulatory flags is to simply call it vaccine. Doesn’t quite fit the definition of vaccine? Change the definition of vaccine. Over and over and over. One thing I agree with these psychopaths about is the urgency to build back better. But my build back better plan is one in which there is a special place for the pseudo elites and their minions that broke decent society. And they’re not gonna like it.
I can really agree with your solution for the sociopaths who broke decent society for their own profit (Fauci chief among them) and the political hacks eager to jump on the bandwagon for personal power and profit. Obviously public is considered a group of sheep to be shown for resources and lies to in as many ways as to continue the system
They hope now, with the aid of the CCP (long accustomed to manipulating large groups) to a even better arrangement for oligarchy and increased profit and to get rid of pesky individual liberties in making the bulk of mankind slaves "you'll own nothing but be happy"
And we thought witchcraft was an old, ancient practice. Witches exit stage left and the allopathic medical model enters stage right. The Greek root word for 'pharma-' is sorceries. Huh, go figure.
God, yes. The same type of statistical shenanigans is used by the climate changers, leading to "statistical significance" in various temperature changes that are not justified by the underlying measurements.
That is so true! This is going to be the new vaccine frenzy, climate change. We are probably all going to have to calculate the carbon footprint for everything we do and pay for it
Yes, they continue to change "temperatures" in order to (in one famous case) to "hide the increase" in the 1600's AD warming period because it didnt fit the "narrative". Lock them up for mankind's peace of mind and to stop their opportunistic lying before they deliberately reduce society to the period before the age of coal and oil
Good luck getting to them
It is sham statistics, baked in with some watered-down 101 Critical Thinking lessons, and a pinch of cognitive science research into biases of reasoning.
Trying to define evidence on the fly without any serious questioning of where and why standards of evidence ARE standards leaves us with... well, everything since 2020.
"evidence-based medicine" which should be renamed "rules of thumb if you don't have time for real math".
Give them Hell to the nth power. It is a much needed focus that will no doubt be a masterpiece. Betcha a nickle it can disrupt a far broader swath of government supported "science" where the jokes about Enron accounting ring true.
math is raciz
Math is a tool to manipulate mathematically "challenged" people (for their own good, of course, or "for the children", or an even "better" excuse, for the "earth")
Very well put. In fact, the "evidence-based medicine" platitude smacks of the US's "rules-based-order." Both are anything but and beg the questions, "whose evidence?" and "whose rules?"
More "weasal" words to avoid debate with generally credulous (naive) people.
Like Obamacare is the ACA and vote rigging bill is a "American voting rights act" or whatever ironical name to obscure real purpose (which ISNT one person, one vote) like CS Lewis said, that when fascism arrives it will be cloaked in "anti-fascism" disguise
The quote of which you comment wasn't from CS Lewis. It's been attributed for years to Sinclair Lewis but the Sinclair Lewis Library has said it is not a Sinclair Lewis quote. It's interesting that the same quote, in a few iterations, has been attributed to many people. None of them appear to be supported. The closest I've seen, that I know is true, was a 1975 comment from Ronald Reagan who said, "When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of Liberalism".
So right!
I knew it, lol. Just couldn't prove it. Looking forward to this series.