Moving Goal Posts: Demanding from an opponent that he or she address more and more points after the initial counter-argument has been satisfied refusing to conceded or accept the opponent’s argument.
You brought up WiFi “allergy” and “FRANKENFOOD”, two new and different points… In the same spirit , and as she is the Green Party candidate, their positions are likely to be relevant. One doesn’t generally promote a candidate anathema to their cause.
And once more, she is not an anti-vaxxer, but she realizes that some people are anti-vaxxers and she attempted to address that. To acknowledge a person’s (misplaced) fears and attempting to address them I do not see as woo-peddling.
And as far as one of her proposed means of addressing that, we do in fact have former corporate heads and the like in high government positions ostensibly regulating the very industries they have made a lot of money from.
That’s not always bad. One might argue “who better to understand the nuances of the industry?” but one might also argue “who better to tilt the playing field to benefit that industry so their former collegues can make even more money?” Tom Wheeler comes to mind, off hand. Is it such a bad thing to ensure that the second argument is addressed?
Not so much. The folks I know who actually have had to work with him uniformly say he’s much more concerned with making principled and soundbite-friendly stands than with doing the work of understanding an issue. That kind of position-staking has a certain utility in a large body like the Senate, where your long-term goal may be to prevent the party as a whole from drifting too far away, but it’s better for killing bills than passing them.
I’m not sure I see an attempt to address the fears, at least not in this statement:
Your mileage may vary, but to me that reads as “I am very carefully avoiding saying that (1) mercury in vaccines was never the problem people claimed it was, and (2) even if there had been a problem with mercury in vaccines, it has been eliminated because there is no more mercury in vaccines.”
This video was pretty cringe-worthy. I see it as pandering rather than something she legitimately believes… and that also doesn’t say great things about her, to be frank.
There was a bit of a hint of that at her St. Louis appearance when a young woman asked her about “the meat industry” and Stein looked kind of uncomfortable for a second before mentioning something about excessive use of antibiotics and about methane (both of which actually are legitimate concerns) but it was pretty plain to see that (A) this was really not going to be something on her agenda, and (B) she didn’t want to say “no” to any potential voters.
With the Wi-Fi thing I think we’re seeing that carried a more absurd distance.
That said, she’s still several notches above the other alternatives in this election, with the possible exception of Giant Meteor
And of course there is the example of tobacco. Doll’s team went looking for the cause of the rise of what had previously been a rare cancer, and showed that it was smoking, but industry lobbyists managed to obfuscate and stonewall for decades.
So I have no problem in believing that if GMOs caused weird deficiency diseases, or if the contributions to the RF background from WiFi distorted proper brain development, then corporate managers would recruit scientists to study the issue in their own special way until they found no effect. The studies wouldn’t have to be rigorous, just plausible enough to give politicians and the wider public an excuse to take no action.
But in the cases of lead and smoking, the information was available behind the smokescreen. Strong evidence. Anyone could read about it. Here with cellphones and WiFi, there is only p-hacking.
You reminded me of this, and I think it’s relevant to the overall discussion of levels of hazard. Any insight you could provide I’d appreciate… As an acoustic engineer I’m sure you’re familiar with noise exposure guidelines to avoid hearing loss… 115 dB @ 30 seconds, 112 dB @ 1 minute, and so on down to 85 dB @ 8 hours.
What I find interesting is that if you extrapolate (yes, I understand the dangers of extreme extrapolation), you get down to 40 dB (library or lower limit of urban ambient sound) and 30 years exposure.
Now, we have standardized charts for age related hearing loss, but I remember reading an article many years ago (I think it was in Scientific American) where audiologists visited some remote tribe where the loudest noise they occasionally heard was thunder and the ambient was extremely quiet, and they had essentially no “age related hearing loss”.
Point is, it is possible that over a lifetime, the constantly whirring fan from your refrigerator or air conditioner, the hours of background radio and TV audio are doing serious hearing damage over a lifetime. To the best of my knowledge this has never been rigorously studied. It is possible that these standardized charts of age related hearing loss are merely documenting the damage that constant low level noise is doing to our hearing over a lifetime.
Now that might all be a load of woo. It might be that there is a lower threshold of sound where the damage just stops. After all, the energy level we’re talking about in acoustic waves like this are extremely low. Or not. The extrapolation might be valid, and until a study is done, who’s to say?
Likewise, radio waves might have some lower threshold where they’re simply not harmful at all. Or not. And it might well be that whatever increase in risk is well below the noise level and who cares? But that, in itself, does not make it woo, in my humble opinion.
Or they need to win because if they don’t win, they can’t do the things they want to do to help people.
I don’t agree with Jill Stein, and I think she’d be a bad president. I feel much the same way about Bernie Sanders–who is also, for the record, a professional politician. But I am not convinced that either of them is in politics because of narcissism. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that either of them, or Gary Johnson, or Hillary Clinton, ran for president because they’re “egomaniacal freaks.” We have in this election a terrifying example of an actual egomaniacal freak driven almost entirely by narcissism. Suggesting that the other candidates running for office (all of whom seem to be doing so in good faith) are in the same category as Trump is obvious, unhelpful, and hyperbolic overgeneralization.
There’s a spectrum, of course, of people between the two extremes of dedication to public service and dedication to self-aggrandizement. And no doubt you could find examples of behavior that suggest some degree of self-regard in most politicians–because they’re human, and humans are by and large self-interested beings. If we limit candidates to those whose motives are 100% pure, we’re going to have a pretty tiny group of people from whom to select our government. Oh, and we’ll have to draft them, because not a one of them is going to seek out running for office.
To put this another way: Do you think you belong in the same category of corporate media shills as Glenn Beck? After all, you both work for ad-supported media companies, which means you must both be motivated largely by the same incentives. Or is that an obvious, unhelpful, hyperbolic overgeneralization?
And also isn’t calling it nonsense. It’s just not a ‘Stanford study’ and wasn’t pure reviewed …but the logic checks out and I’ve yet to see an attempt at debunking that wasn’t completely incompetent (like this one)…though some have very correctly pointed out that some of the ‘no paper trail’ states are actually hybrids like PA while they belonged in the ‘no paper trail’ column that should’ve been emphasized better in the study.
It’s a lesson about the nature of people who become professional politicians: they’re egomaniacal freaks who desperately need to win, and every vote is another molecule of supply for their narcissism.
Thank god we have the modest, self-effacing, utterly virtuous Hillary Clinton to vote for, so we are not tempted to vote for that filthy egomaniac Stein, amirite, Rob???
Beyond agreed. Nothing wrong with believing goofy things (We all have that right and should embrace it!), but don’t pretend it’s going to interfere with reality. And of course the the homeopath marketing crowd takes it beyond too far.
Where’s the Science party? Neil Tyson/Emily Graslie FTW!
So I briefly perused their paper. The first link is the (rather short) paper and the second link is the appendix with more content.
They certainly don’t get any points for presentation.
It seems that they did linear regression (selecting a number of potentially predictive variables) and found that the coefficient for “paper trail” was statistically significant. That in itself doesn’t really prove anything. Correlation isn’t causation, blah blah blah. Possibly more important is that “paper trail” might (spuriously?) correlate with an omitted causal variable and so acts as a proxy. My case for this is that selecting electronic voting is a political decision which reflects a strong trust in the system. That’s a core part of HRC’s message.
Then there’s the use of exit polling. It’s well known that it’s highly inaccurate, especially with groups that are likely to be suspicious of exit pollsters. (minorities)
Also, in any of these grand conspiracy scenarios, you have to ask: how do they keep all the co-conspirators quiet? No one had second thoughts? There aren’t any emails? Was Hillary supposed to have done this all herself?
And then there’s this:
The expert whose numbers were utilized for the paper wasn’t expressly cited by name, but his moniker appeared on the linked spreadsheet: Richard Charnin. Charnin indeed lists some impressive statistical credentials on his personal blog, but he also appears to expend much of his focus on conspiracy theories related to the JFK assassination (which raises the question of whether his math skills outstrip his ability to apply skeptical reasoning to data).
When there’s smoke there’s fire, unless there is a smoke machine.
The key point in the study (and the concern) is the variance between exit polling and actual results between the states with and without audit trails.
So ignore the accuracy or lack of accuracy with exit polling, it’s not relevant. That inaccuracy should trend consistently, yet it does not. That’s 101-level stuff.
Except we have sourced data, and no adequate debunking yet. If it was easy somebody should’ve done it already. It’s kind of hovering in Schrodinger-land right now.
Shenanigans isn’t the only possible explanation, but it’s certainly indicative of something worthy of further analysis. Whatever it is, it’s interesting! I’ll also note that I haven’t dug heavily into the data (they’ve got a good bit of it in their appendix). I’ve got a lot going on right now and I was watching for somebody to do a proper sourced analytic breakdown…something I haven’t seen yet. Mostly just polarizing ‘The Dems did something evil’ and ‘This is totally untrue and we must ignore it!’
Neither of those impresses me in the least. Currently the issue has neither been debunked, nor has it gained extra credence.
, and as she is the Green Party candidate, their positions are likely to be relevant. One doesn’t generally promote a candidate anathema to their cause.
