This article started out purely as a rant on overcooked steak, but it turned into a full discussion on sous vide and meat. I may end up writing a series of articles on this topic.« Continue »
Sous Vide and Meat: Part I
Archives for June 2018
Left Handed People
The other night I got into an argument with my sister about discriminated classes, and I pointed out that one of the most discriminated classes that is almost completely ignored is left handed people. Both my sister and I are left handed, but she does not perceive any kind of real discrimination. Is it because there isn’t a significant amount of discrimination, or is it because social justice warriors don’t go around screaming about left handed discrimination?
But what discrimination is there? It can’t be that bad, can it? It can. In fact, our own language is permeated by that discrimination, as are our social norms. The “right” way is the correct way. Sinister, which has come to mean evil, is quite literally the Latin word for “left.” If you are ambidextrous, you have two right hands. If you are a poor dancer, you have two left feet. Moreover, when you go to greet someone, you shake their hand, but only by reaching out your right hand.
Of course there is also the obvious material issues with being left handed. The world is set up for right handed people. But issues are far more extreme than that. Research has suggested that left handed surgeons have more difficulty than right handed surgeons. There is evidence justifying the claim that people who are left handed have different brains, and yet left handed people seem to be generally excluded from research. This exclusion is not accidental. Left handed people still make up 10 – 15% of the population, but they are excluded from these studies to reduce variance.
Of course, we don’t have certain forms of discrimination that we used to have. Left handed people are no longer burned at the stake or beaten into using their right hands. Of course, since left-handedness is partially genetic, past discrimination very well may have had an influence on the current state of left handed people, and may also be one reason why it is difficult to find products designed to be used by left handed people. It’s also possible that families with a tendency towards left-handedness are also economically disadvantaged because of the past, though given that only about 25% of handedness is hereditary, that might be a bit of a stretch.
Of course, things have settled down a bit in the United States. In other countries, this is not necessarily the case. In India, eating food with your left hand is disrespectful. It can be quite offensive to use your left hand in the Middle East. Regardless, there is clear discrimination within our culture, against left handed people. It is embedded in our language and our greetings, as well as our production of tools and research criterion. It seems that the only reason why left handed people are not given more attention is that social justice warriors have not taken up the mantle.
The post Left Handed People appeared first on Politicoid.
Email to the National Academy of Sciences: Why Evolution is not fF
I recently emailed the National Academy of Sciences in order to explain why their article on evolution is incorrect. I did not expect a reply, and I did not get one, as of yet, but misrepresenting science is not acceptable. Below is the email.
I realize that this discussion is probably not going to be well accepted, and is almost certainly not going to change anyone’s mind to the point of updating the NAS site. However, I decided I would still provide my two cents. For quite a while, I have had an issue with calling evolution fact. I am not saying that evolution is not true. I rely on the body of theory of evolution for my on research. However, that does not mean that we can know that evolution is true, or even likely to be true.
I am sure that you are well aware of the problem of induction. Hume and Popper are among many philosophers of science who recognized that it is difficult to justify the assumption that a theory is true, simply because it has shown to make accurate predictions in the past. We do assume that an unfalsified, yet repeatedly tested theory, is true. But we take this position as axiomatically true.
Bayesian inference seems to solve the problem of induction, but the issue with Bayesian inference is that it is brittle: it exhibits chaotic behavior with respect to the selection of priors. Falsification does not have this issue. That is because falsification is simply a statistical form of proof by contradiction, whether using the p-value approach or the Bayesian approach. We start by assuming that our theory is true, and that assumption gives us everything we need to take observations and estimate the probability of a theory being true. However, because we started with the assumption that the theory is true, stating that it is so is simply circular reasoning. Thus it is only valid to say that we have found a maximum probability of truth, or minimum probability of falsity, based on the observations recorded to date.
A theory becomes a fact, if it is certainly true, or at least very likely to be true. The brittleness of Bayesian inference, and the overall problem of induction allows us to make any claim about a theory being almost certainly true. Furthermore, without knowing how close to being true the body of theory on evolution actually is, we cannot say how likely it will be that it is falsified in the future. We cannot say anything about the distribution of future observations, except by assuming that which we are setting out to show, which again would be circular reasoning, except in the case of falsification.
I recognize the need to justify evolution, which is an incredibly robust body of theory, that is relied upon for so much of our research, our medicine, and so much more, especially when there is still a push to promote creationism as if it were valid theory, when it is not. But any attempt to defend evolution should not result in a misrepresentation of it as a theory or a misrepresentation of science itself. Perhaps one day the problem of induction will be solved, and when that occurs, it will be the most important advancement of scientific investigation itself, since the initial formalization of science. But today is not that day, and evolution cannot be taken as being anything more than a theory, which has yet to be falsified.
Thank you for your consideration,
Daniel Goldman
The post Email to the National Academy of Sciences: Why Evolution is not fF appeared first on The Spiritual Anthropologist.
Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Flawed Study
In a recent article, posted on Atheist Republic, there was a suggestion that fundamentalist religion was positively associated with PNIMRs. However, the analysis seems to be an interpretation, of an interpretation, of maybe even one more level of interpretation before getting to the actual study. Furthemore, the study itself faces significant methodological errors.
The study, “Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Community-Level Investigation of Denominational Variations in Postneonatal Deaths,” conducted by Garcia, Bartkowski, and Xu, and published in May of 2018 attempts to test the following hypotheses.
H1: Counties with a greater proportion of Catholic adherents will exhibit reduced PNIMRs.
H2: Counties with a greater proportion of conservative Protestants will exhibit higher PNIMRs.
H3: The effects of religious ecology on PNIMRs will be more pronounced in 2010 than in 1990 because of medical advancements and public awareness campaigns implemented after 1990.
There are a number of issues with the study. First off, an ordinary least squares regression was used, without any real justification. The model was assumed to be linear, without any justification. And the variables were assumed to be independent, even when there is evidence rejecting that assumption. Admittedly, it is an easy to use model, so it’s not too surprising, but I don’t see any initial analysis of the data which justifies a specific model, at all. The adjusted R-squared also suggests a very poor fit for the model. That being said, sometimes even with a poor fit, we can glean some information out of such a model. But in most cases, the regressed variables were not statistically significant.
The study therefore does not reasonably justify the claim that religious affiliation is related to PNIMRs. There are a few exceptions, but even in those cases, the impact on PNIMRs seems to be very small: orders of magnitude less than some of the control variables, and they may be due to an inability to properly capture how poverty relates to religious affiliation: poverty and religious affiliation are not independent variables as religious affiliation tends to be used as a way to gain access to a social network, counseling resources, etc and it seems to provide some level of stress reduction (APA).
Another interesting point is that the theory being tested suggests that technological advancements would reduce PNIMRs and make the effects of religious opposition to medical treatment more pronounced. However, even limiting the analysis to conservative protestants, the regression model for 2000 gives a coefficient of 0.003 for the relationship between adherence to conservative Protestantism and PNIMRs and a coefficient of 0.001 for 2010. So there is an apparent drop in the relationship between conservative Protestant affiliation and PNIMRs. H3 does specifically look at the change from 1990 to 2000, but there should be a similar change between 2000 and 2010, as medical technology continues to evolve.
The analysis for H3 is problematic. The issue is that no test for significance was used. Generally, when a researcher wants to test to see if there is a change over time, the researcher would employ some statistical test for difference. Instead, a simple observation between the two statistics was made. Moreover, the comparison was made between a value which did not reach statistical significance, and a variable which did reach statistical significance.
I understand the desire to show results consistent with the initial theory being tested. There is a great deal of positive publication bias. A peer reviewed journal is much less likely to publish a paper if there isn’t an apparent result which is “interesting.” However, the following errors are glaring:
- Failure to justify the model used, including justification for linearity and independence.
- Weak R-squared
- Dwarfing of the relationship between religiosity and PNIMRs, by control variables
- Apparent reduction in the effect that conservative Protestant affiliation has on PNIMRs, in the years between 2000 and 2010 , along with a lack of use of actual statistical testing for differences, and relying on data which was not statistically significant, there is no reasonable justification for the conclusion that was made.
For these reasons, the study should be thrown out as being incredibly flawed. The conclusion of the paper is not justified based on the actual findings of the paper.
Study Source: https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12487
The post Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Flawed Study appeared first on The Spiritual Anthropologist.
Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Flawed Study
In a recent article, posted on Atheist Republic, there was a suggestion that fundamentalist religion was positively associated with PNIMRs. However, the analysis seems to be an interpretation, of an interpretation, of maybe even one more level of interpretation before getting to the actual study. Furthemore, the study itself faces significant methodological errors.
The study, “Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Community-Level Investigation of Denominational Variations in Postneonatal Deaths,” conducted by Garcia, Bartkowski, and Xu, and published in May of 2018 attempts to test the following hypotheses.
H1: Counties with a greater proportion of Catholic adherents will exhibit reduced PNIMRs.
H2: Counties with a greater proportion of conservative Protestants will exhibit higher PNIMRs.
H3: The effects of religious ecology on PNIMRs will be more pronounced in 2010 than in 1990 because of medical advancements and public awareness campaigns implemented after 1990.
There are a number of issues with the study. First off, an ordinary least squares regression was used, without any real justification. The model was assumed to be linear, without any justification. And the variables were assumed to be independent, even when there is evidence rejecting that assumption. Admittedly, it is an easy to use model, so it’s not too surprising, but I don’t see any initial analysis of the data which justifies a specific model, at all. The adjusted R-squared also suggests a very poor fit for the model. That being said, sometimes even with a poor fit, we can glean some information out of such a model. But in most cases, the regressed variables were not statistically significant.
The study therefore does not reasonably justify the claim that religious affiliation is related to PNIMRs. There are a few exceptions, but even in those cases, the impact on PNIMRs seems to be very small: orders of magnitude less than some of the control variables, and they may be due to an inability to properly capture how poverty relates to religious affiliation: poverty and religious affiliation are not independent variables as religious affiliation tends to be used as a way to gain access to a social network, counseling resources, etc and it seems to provide some level of stress reduction (APA).
Another interesting point is that the theory being tested suggests that technological advancements would reduce PNIMRs and make the effects of religious opposition to medical treatment more pronounced. However, even limiting the analysis to conservative protestants, the regression model for 2000 gives a coefficient of 0.003 for the relationship between adherence to conservative Protestantism and PNIMRs and a coefficient of 0.001 for 2010. So there is an apparent drop in the relationship between conservative Protestant affiliation and PNIMRs. H3 does specifically look at the change from 1990 to 2000, but there should be a similar change between 2000 and 2010, as medical technology continues to evolve.
The analysis for H3 is problematic. The issue is that no test for significance was used. Generally, when a researcher wants to test to see if there is a change over time, the researcher would employ some statistical test for difference. Instead, a simple observation between the two statistics was made. Moreover, the comparison was made between a value which did not reach statistical significance, and a variable which did reach statistical significance.
I understand the desire to show results consistent with the initial theory being tested. There is a great deal of positive publication bias. A peer reviewed journal is much less likely to publish a paper if there isn’t an apparent result which is “interesting.” However, the following errors are glaring:
- Failure to justify the model used, including justification for linearity and independence.
- Weak R-squared
- Dwarfing of the relationship between religiosity and PNIMRs, by control variables
- Apparent reduction in the effect that conservative Protestant affiliation has on PNIMRs, in the years between 2000 and 2010 , along with a lack of use of actual statistical testing for differences, and relying on data which was not statistically significant, there is no reasonable justification for the conclusion that was made.
For these reasons, the study should be thrown out as being incredibly flawed. The conclusion of the paper is not justified based on the actual findings of the paper.
Study Source: https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12487
The post Religion and Infant Mortality in the United States: A Flawed Study appeared first on The Spiritual Anthropologist.