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Arguing on Facebook

• Common Core
• Sort of summary of arguments

 

Points of Clairy

1. Neuron
• Apologies to this very up-and-up publication. They look super cool.
• For those who care about such things, Dave's PSN ID: Atomanewtoneuron

 

2. Return to Religulous

We talked about the end of Bill Maher's 2008 movie last time.

Dave's critique was that Maher seemed to succumb to the tactics of his opponents: threats of global catastrophe if we don't follow his teachings.

Adam adds some context, by pointing out that Religulous came out six months after a picture by Ben Stein that had been produced as a defense of intelligent design (ID). Stein's production company promoted to film to the people they wanted interview as a movie about crossing the divide between evolution and ID. Some big names in each domain were approached with this innocuous proposal. They agreed, and then the movie turned out to have been made by a completely different company, one that is pro-intelligent design. They took all of the experts’ views out of context and made the film an argument against evolution. It was narrated by Ben Stein, with the point being that people who promote intelligent design are shunned and fired in the academic world. The punch line is that at the end, Stein is promoting “what evolution does to the world.” Images of Nazis, prisoners in Cambodia, atomic bombs, etc. It is possible, therefore, that Bill Maher was responding directly to that method.

Let's clear this up now. After we produced this episode, we went back and watched the end of Stein's movie, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. You can check out the entire picture here.

As it turns out, the ending of Stein’s film does not use the imagery we described in the podcast. Rather, it draws a comparison between his (Stein's) fight as an ID proponent and the historical fight that culminated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. His ending monologue is a speech given to a crowd of supporters while various clips are edited in to buttress his argument.

• Images of troops guarding the soviet side of the border overlay comments about how the ID crowd is being kept out of science.
• Clips of Reagan and his famous speech in support of freedom and the demolition of the wall interleave Stein’s own speech about his lack of fear of the establishment.
• Interviews with ID proponents come in now, expressing their fervent hope that the scientific community will allow them to join the conversation, interspersed with shots of citizens tearing chunks off of the Berlin Wall.
• Stein ends his speech with, “If we all stand up for freedom—if we all do that—we will all overcome,” and his audience rises to its feet in applause (read the SciAm article below for info on the audience).
• Cut to the wall coming down while the music ramps up with The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.”
• Stein then finishes his film with a call to action, saying that if you don’t get involved, then “Will anyone be left to carry on this struggle?”
• And he no shit for real finishes by saying, “Anyone? [pause] Anyone?”

So we didn't give Stein a fair hearing before recording the program, and we certainly didn't go down the right track for Maher’s sake. If anything, it appears that if Maher was responding to Stein, then he upped that particular ante exponentially. That said, we so no reason to draw that conclusion. Maher may have had any reason in the world to use his methodology, and we have no reason to suspect it had anything to do with Stein's movie.

We regret the assumption and misinformation that formed the basis of this part of the conversation.

And here is some additional reading material about Expelled.

• The IMDB entry.
• The always "unbiased" view of Rotten Tomatoes.
• An important rebuttal to the movie from Scientific American, who had been misrepresented in Stein's picture.

 

Articles

Base rate fallacy review

Watch this fun video for a fun recap.

 

We revisit base rate, this time with a new (and we hope easier to follow) example. Check out the breathalyzer problem for the source of inspiration.

 

Multiple comparisons problem

Once again, we link to the xkcd comic that exemplifies this problem: Significant .

 

Multiple comparisons correction

This video will not help you understand Bonferroni .

 

As always, our major source of inspiration on this topic: Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart

 

NPR: Mars jelly donut mystery solved

Spoiler alert: It's a rock. Shh.

 

NSF: One in four Americans thinks the sun goes around the earth

You were asked whether the Sun orbits the Earth or vice versa. You said versa…
survey say…!
Bzzzzt!

 

TED Push

Julian Treasure talks about how to improve your listening and hearing skills.
In Birkenstocks.

 

Next time!

1. Review Standard Deviation
2. Regression to the Mean

 

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(Cover image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_visualization)

 

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