I’ve been on holiday for the past two weeks. I had a to-do list this long, so of course I did other stuff. Most of what I actually achieved was working on two cover-status articles for RationalWiki.
Freeman on the land—like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They’ve actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them … which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.
101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe—a point-by-point refutation of a Creation Ministries International Gish gallop. This one required actually searching out papers from creationist pseudojournals. The intended audience is people miseducated into creationism who have an Internet connection and are capable of reading and thinking. I have been told by some that the current approach would actually have worked on them, so this article might indeed make the world a better place.
I have other “what have you been working on?” to post, will do so when I have them to link.
Freeman on the land—like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They’ve actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them … which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.
Oh dear, these people. We have them over here too; I could go on for a while about the online arguments I’ve gotten in over their nonsense, but I’ll sum their ineptitude by saying: they gave their website an Irish name, but got the grammar wrong. It doesn’t really mean anything.
there are known recent beneficial mutations in humans [...] a mutation allowing humans to digest milk in adulthood that became common in Europe around 10,000 years ago [...] At the time, people with this mutation left almost ten times as many descendants as people without it.
What does this actually mean? There seem to be two obvious interpretations. (1) “The expected number of surviving children of a person with the mutation was 10x that of a person without it.” That’s pretty hard to believe[1]. (2) “Over some unspecified number of generations the average number of descendants per person with the mutation was 10x that of someone without”. Isn’t that a really silly metric? (Consider a typical very-slightly-beneficial mutation. With probability modestly over 1⁄2 it gets fixed in the population, and then “people with this mutation left infinity times as many descendants as people without it”.) Not to mention that “at the time” then doesn’t make much sense.
What am I missing here?
[1] Most credible approximation to this that I can come up with: first lactose tolerance becomes widespread, then non-human milk becomes an important food source, then lactose intolerance becomes a big big handicap and people without it could easily have 10x fewer surviving offspring. But here the real heavy lifting is done by whatever process gets lactose tolerance widespread in the first place, and there’s no explanation for the alleged 10x advantage during that period.
If you got this from a popularization you may have run into a miscommunication about odds ratios versus relative rates? This is one of those known problems that will be around for a long time because its a subtle point and being wrong on the subtle point helps people score “OMG that’s amazing!” points that are rhetorically effective (and get higher click-through when put in a headline) but which are not very accurate.
I have good library access. Send me a PM with your email and I’ll email you the PDF if you want to check the original source for precise numbers :-)
Reading that paper, I feel like a dog being shown a card trick … but gjm hypothesises a reporter being told “almost 10% more” (upper bound of likely selection coefficient ~0.97 edit: ~0.097) and hearing “almost ten times more”. This is alarmingly plausible.
I’ve been on holiday for the past two weeks. I had a to-do list this long, so of course I did other stuff. Most of what I actually achieved was working on two cover-status articles for RationalWiki.
Freeman on the land—like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They’ve actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them … which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.
101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe—a point-by-point refutation of a Creation Ministries International Gish gallop. This one required actually searching out papers from creationist pseudojournals. The intended audience is people miseducated into creationism who have an Internet connection and are capable of reading and thinking. I have been told by some that the current approach would actually have worked on them, so this article might indeed make the world a better place.
I have other “what have you been working on?” to post, will do so when I have them to link.
Oh dear, these people. We have them over here too; I could go on for a while about the online arguments I’ve gotten in over their nonsense, but I’ll sum their ineptitude by saying: they gave their website an Irish name, but got the grammar wrong. It doesn’t really mean anything.
What does this actually mean? There seem to be two obvious interpretations. (1) “The expected number of surviving children of a person with the mutation was 10x that of a person without it.” That’s pretty hard to believe[1]. (2) “Over some unspecified number of generations the average number of descendants per person with the mutation was 10x that of someone without”. Isn’t that a really silly metric? (Consider a typical very-slightly-beneficial mutation. With probability modestly over 1⁄2 it gets fixed in the population, and then “people with this mutation left infinity times as many descendants as people without it”.) Not to mention that “at the time” then doesn’t make much sense.
What am I missing here?
[1] Most credible approximation to this that I can come up with: first lactose tolerance becomes widespread, then non-human milk becomes an important food source, then lactose intolerance becomes a big big handicap and people without it could easily have 10x fewer surviving offspring. But here the real heavy lifting is done by whatever process gets lactose tolerance widespread in the first place, and there’s no explanation for the alleged 10x advantage during that period.
The “ten times” is from the referenced NYT article. It could do with tracking to the source, yes.
edit: This appears to be the original paper, and it’s paywalled. But I’ll keep looking for a copy.
If you got this from a popularization you may have run into a miscommunication about odds ratios versus relative rates? This is one of those known problems that will be around for a long time because its a subtle point and being wrong on the subtle point helps people score “OMG that’s amazing!” points that are rhetorically effective (and get higher click-through when put in a headline) but which are not very accurate.
I have good library access. Send me a PM with your email and I’ll email you the PDF if you want to check the original source for precise numbers :-)
Reading that paper, I feel like a dog being shown a card trick … but gjm hypothesises a reporter being told “almost 10% more” (upper bound of likely selection coefficient ~0.97 edit: ~0.097) and hearing “almost ten times more”. This is alarmingly plausible.
Correction: 0.097, not 0.97.
I can access it. If you PM me your email address, I can send it to you.