Among the most insidious aspects of the Covid Mania is surely the distortion of truth in terms of the generally accepted meaning of certain terms and concepts
This is all in part made possible because most humans do not understand probability, statistical or otherwise.
(If we did, lotteries and gambling wouldn't exist.)
People think a 1/1000 risk of an adverse reaction to a drug is low odds. In reality, it is high odds. They think that if they took the drug once with no ill effect, then they will never experience a bad effect when they take it again. But that's not how it works.
It's 1/1000 each time.
I've tried to teach this despite not being a maths-teacher, by using the following example:
"Imagine if you will that every time you turned on or off an electrical switch, you had a 1/1000 risk of suffering a mild electrical shock."
Not even this gets it across, most of the time, because people latch on to "But that doesn't happen" - because apparently the ability for abstract thinking or using hypotheticals or analogies aren't common, but rare.
And so people will happily inject or eat or rub on chemicals that make gasoline seem the healthy option. Because they don't get that it's 1/1000 (or whatever) each time, and for each reaction.
I did manage to get my brother to understand, but he's smart.
"Imagine that the brakes of your car failed 1/1000, would you drive it if you knew the odds of that happening?"
"Of course not! . . . Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, that's a good point - the odds should be as low as can be, and balanced against the risk of not taking a drug, of course. Isn't that how it's set up?"
No, I told him, it's not. It's like it is in your field, I told him: you can either be a geologist working for clean water and environmentally sound practices, or you can make a lot of money for the oil and gas industry. It's the same with medicines. You either deliver product, and damn the consequences ad make a lot of money and get grants and researcher-positions sponsored by the industry, or you are reduced to lecturing and working at the pharmacy or in health care.
And since politicians have much lower ethical abilities and standards than average people, and capitalists have no ethics at all...
Exactly. I think it was the late physicist Albert Bartlett who coined the phrase: 'The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.' (See his Wikipedia [sic] entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett)
I typically point people towards this excellent talk by him:
This is all in part made possible because most humans do not understand probability, statistical or otherwise.
(If we did, lotteries and gambling wouldn't exist.)
People think a 1/1000 risk of an adverse reaction to a drug is low odds. In reality, it is high odds. They think that if they took the drug once with no ill effect, then they will never experience a bad effect when they take it again. But that's not how it works.
It's 1/1000 each time.
I've tried to teach this despite not being a maths-teacher, by using the following example:
"Imagine if you will that every time you turned on or off an electrical switch, you had a 1/1000 risk of suffering a mild electrical shock."
Not even this gets it across, most of the time, because people latch on to "But that doesn't happen" - because apparently the ability for abstract thinking or using hypotheticals or analogies aren't common, but rare.
And so people will happily inject or eat or rub on chemicals that make gasoline seem the healthy option. Because they don't get that it's 1/1000 (or whatever) each time, and for each reaction.
I did manage to get my brother to understand, but he's smart.
"Imagine that the brakes of your car failed 1/1000, would you drive it if you knew the odds of that happening?"
"Of course not! . . . Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, that's a good point - the odds should be as low as can be, and balanced against the risk of not taking a drug, of course. Isn't that how it's set up?"
No, I told him, it's not. It's like it is in your field, I told him: you can either be a geologist working for clean water and environmentally sound practices, or you can make a lot of money for the oil and gas industry. It's the same with medicines. You either deliver product, and damn the consequences ad make a lot of money and get grants and researcher-positions sponsored by the industry, or you are reduced to lecturing and working at the pharmacy or in health care.
And since politicians have much lower ethical abilities and standards than average people, and capitalists have no ethics at all...
Exactly. I think it was the late physicist Albert Bartlett who coined the phrase: 'The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.' (See his Wikipedia [sic] entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett)
I typically point people towards this excellent talk by him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
Those who don't 'get it' afterwards, well, they are lost.