Mar 23, 2023·edited Mar 23, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford
I have a biostats master's degree, which was extremely rigorous and difficult, basically doing calculus 8 hours a day for the first year, but I would argue that lack of math isn't truly the core problem. Academics often miss very simple things. In the first large project I worked on (as a graduate student), which was data from a computer-guided telephone survey of new breastfeeding mothers, the computer program contained an erroneous "skip" that caused the majority of women to skip past many of the vital questions to the end of the survey. Another student had worked on these data for 9 months (!!) and never noticed the immense amount of missing data.
Another project I worked on, there was a massive outlier in the data which completely changed the regression results depending on whether it was included or excluded. No one had simply plotted the data. It was a swarm of data points showing no trend but with one huge outlier driving the entirety of the slope estimate. There are statistics to identify outliers / high-leverage data points, but really, you just needed the simplest plot to see there was an issue.
Another project I worked on regarding mercury levels in dentists failed to control for mercury spills in the office, which was available data, but had been ignored. A mercury spill within the previous 6 months was a significant predictor of mercury levels and altered several models and conclusions once accounted for. No one had apparently read the entire survey and thought "Hey.... might this be a confounding variable?" Except me.
Speaking of confounding, ask just about anyone in academia what negative confounding is. They won't know. It's when there are two opposite trends which tend to co-occur. For instance, for one of my clients studying women in Kenya and their usage of professional midwives, having more money was a positive for hiring professional help, but having more children was a negative (because they were old hands at it by then). Well, women with more children tended to have more money, so the positive (money) and the negative (old hands at it by now) canceled each other out. Neither seemed related to the decision to hire a midwife, but that was incorrect. Both had to be taken into account *simultaneously* to see the true effects. Which is also true of healthy / wealthy / educated status and harms caused by vaccination; they are opposite effects on mortality, but they co-occur, so must be addressed simultaneously. It's negative confounding. Few in academia seems to grok this concept.
The stupid runs deep. But math isn't usually the problem in my opinion -- PhD statisticians adore mathematical models and want to outdo each other with the latest, most complex clustered-data time series multi-level sampling blah blah blah. Meanwhile nobody does effing scatter plots.
It's an inability to think with genuine curiosity, in my opinion, more often than it is a lack of rigorous math. I'm convinced academia now is deliberately churning out useful idiots because a system this complex and this corrupt needs a great, great many of them in order to run.
I'll be honest my stats suck and I've long felt I should do something about that.
I have nothing more than high school level Calc and that was a long time ago and avoided math like the plague when doing my biology degree.
Another one of those stories of avoiding something you don't like and then later in life realizing you should have hit it head on and embraced the pain. I'd be better off now for sure.
Do you have a recommendation for how I might address my stats deficiency?
I think you really are insightful about what we once called SES, socioeconomic status. I think, though, there are other factors with vaccine injury, or no injury. I just don't know what they are. Maybe the number of ace 2 receptors, the vitamin D level, the stress level--even rich people have differing biologies. But statistics are about the big picture, not the anomalies. Generally, rich people do better in all metrics of health, even with four vaccines that are beyond creepy.
I don'thave a BA or BS in anything and the importance of what you are saying here came thru crystal clear and like roaring rolling thunder. I look forward to one day being trained by you in statistics and specifically and especially how to not be fooled by corporate manipulated biostatistics. May your course (when available) be REQUIRED for all claiming to be expert in biostatistics. All it takes is one generation of students without this kind of knowledge and we are all sunk.
“ It took only a few people to build the scaffolding of that grand illusion. The rest of the Big Picture was filled in by the imaginations of the audience.”
I listened to a teacher today explaining that things like chatgbt are great for education and that even ivy league schools aren't requiring students write essays for admission. "Educators" are celebrating that students don't have to show mastery of many basic skills in order to graduate and go to college. I suppose this is part of the reason manipulations like ignoring HUB, was so easy to pull off. The dumbing down of Americans, slowly then suddenly by polluting the education system with "progressivism", erasing critical thinking and basic educational competencies (reading, writing, science and math). We are a a growing society of mushy brains that can agree to lies such as boys can become girls, masks save lives and you'll kill Grandma if you don't get this shot. It seems bad now but Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World may be our reality very soon.
I wish I'd benefited from HUB (which I understand to mean the false attribution of benefit to the intervention taken by healthy people that actually occurs equally to matched cohort of healthy people who didn't take the intervention but are never counted) back when I was a supposedly healthy twenty-something athletic sugar-avoiding non-drinking low-fat vegetarian, conscientiously getting 7.5 hours of sleep each night and taking doctor-recommended annual flu shots to try to avoid frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia that had plagued me from early childhood. Flu shots were definitely not protective. Every year I was felled by at least two nasty ILIs and missed weeks of work, bedridden. In fact the first bad one usually happened within ten days after the October flu shot. I don't know why I wasn't suspicious about efficacy sooner. Took me a decade to stop following bad medical advice about 'healthy' diet and flu shots and start taking D3. I wonder if HUB would disappear if researchers would count ILIs that occur within the two-week post-jab period, that are not recorded as the adverse effect of immediate post-jab immunosuppression.
If I present this to a person with average understanding, including having been subject to massive propaganda over the last few years, I *expect* to get the response that the early vax rollout seemed to correlate with a decline in cases and hospitalizations, which presumably wouldn't involve the HUB, because older and sicker people were prioritized for access to this health-protecting treatment. I imagine you have a response, and I'd be very interested in hearing it.
I have to disagree with this. I think that you are missing an important point. Many of those too sick to take vaccines are not poor or uneducated--they are likely in hospice or otherwise too sick to be injected. The Death's Door Bias isn't quite the same as the HUB, but the DDB likely plays a huge role in unvaccinated mortality.
Our current Surgeon General is another diversity hire. It’s apparent any time he opens his mouth. 🤦♀️
I have a biostats master's degree, which was extremely rigorous and difficult, basically doing calculus 8 hours a day for the first year, but I would argue that lack of math isn't truly the core problem. Academics often miss very simple things. In the first large project I worked on (as a graduate student), which was data from a computer-guided telephone survey of new breastfeeding mothers, the computer program contained an erroneous "skip" that caused the majority of women to skip past many of the vital questions to the end of the survey. Another student had worked on these data for 9 months (!!) and never noticed the immense amount of missing data.
Another project I worked on, there was a massive outlier in the data which completely changed the regression results depending on whether it was included or excluded. No one had simply plotted the data. It was a swarm of data points showing no trend but with one huge outlier driving the entirety of the slope estimate. There are statistics to identify outliers / high-leverage data points, but really, you just needed the simplest plot to see there was an issue.
Another project I worked on regarding mercury levels in dentists failed to control for mercury spills in the office, which was available data, but had been ignored. A mercury spill within the previous 6 months was a significant predictor of mercury levels and altered several models and conclusions once accounted for. No one had apparently read the entire survey and thought "Hey.... might this be a confounding variable?" Except me.
Speaking of confounding, ask just about anyone in academia what negative confounding is. They won't know. It's when there are two opposite trends which tend to co-occur. For instance, for one of my clients studying women in Kenya and their usage of professional midwives, having more money was a positive for hiring professional help, but having more children was a negative (because they were old hands at it by then). Well, women with more children tended to have more money, so the positive (money) and the negative (old hands at it by now) canceled each other out. Neither seemed related to the decision to hire a midwife, but that was incorrect. Both had to be taken into account *simultaneously* to see the true effects. Which is also true of healthy / wealthy / educated status and harms caused by vaccination; they are opposite effects on mortality, but they co-occur, so must be addressed simultaneously. It's negative confounding. Few in academia seems to grok this concept.
The stupid runs deep. But math isn't usually the problem in my opinion -- PhD statisticians adore mathematical models and want to outdo each other with the latest, most complex clustered-data time series multi-level sampling blah blah blah. Meanwhile nobody does effing scatter plots.
It's an inability to think with genuine curiosity, in my opinion, more often than it is a lack of rigorous math. I'm convinced academia now is deliberately churning out useful idiots because a system this complex and this corrupt needs a great, great many of them in order to run.
Those absorbed by the system have to hate the skeptics, otherwise they would have to hate themselves.
Thanks Mathew, love your work.
I'll be honest my stats suck and I've long felt I should do something about that.
I have nothing more than high school level Calc and that was a long time ago and avoided math like the plague when doing my biology degree.
Another one of those stories of avoiding something you don't like and then later in life realizing you should have hit it head on and embraced the pain. I'd be better off now for sure.
Do you have a recommendation for how I might address my stats deficiency?
I think you really are insightful about what we once called SES, socioeconomic status. I think, though, there are other factors with vaccine injury, or no injury. I just don't know what they are. Maybe the number of ace 2 receptors, the vitamin D level, the stress level--even rich people have differing biologies. But statistics are about the big picture, not the anomalies. Generally, rich people do better in all metrics of health, even with four vaccines that are beyond creepy.
Very impressive article. Biases and personal greed tends to miss a lot when it comes to ‘the science.’
This is such an excellent important article!
I don'thave a BA or BS in anything and the importance of what you are saying here came thru crystal clear and like roaring rolling thunder. I look forward to one day being trained by you in statistics and specifically and especially how to not be fooled by corporate manipulated biostatistics. May your course (when available) be REQUIRED for all claiming to be expert in biostatistics. All it takes is one generation of students without this kind of knowledge and we are all sunk.
“ It took only a few people to build the scaffolding of that grand illusion. The rest of the Big Picture was filled in by the imaginations of the audience.”
Sounds like the moon landing.
I listened to a teacher today explaining that things like chatgbt are great for education and that even ivy league schools aren't requiring students write essays for admission. "Educators" are celebrating that students don't have to show mastery of many basic skills in order to graduate and go to college. I suppose this is part of the reason manipulations like ignoring HUB, was so easy to pull off. The dumbing down of Americans, slowly then suddenly by polluting the education system with "progressivism", erasing critical thinking and basic educational competencies (reading, writing, science and math). We are a a growing society of mushy brains that can agree to lies such as boys can become girls, masks save lives and you'll kill Grandma if you don't get this shot. It seems bad now but Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World may be our reality very soon.
Mathew, thank you for your material. I continue to learn invaluable information from you. Much respect to you.
Could I trouble you to define an acronym on its initial usage. That would be very helpful for me.
I wish I'd benefited from HUB (which I understand to mean the false attribution of benefit to the intervention taken by healthy people that actually occurs equally to matched cohort of healthy people who didn't take the intervention but are never counted) back when I was a supposedly healthy twenty-something athletic sugar-avoiding non-drinking low-fat vegetarian, conscientiously getting 7.5 hours of sleep each night and taking doctor-recommended annual flu shots to try to avoid frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia that had plagued me from early childhood. Flu shots were definitely not protective. Every year I was felled by at least two nasty ILIs and missed weeks of work, bedridden. In fact the first bad one usually happened within ten days after the October flu shot. I don't know why I wasn't suspicious about efficacy sooner. Took me a decade to stop following bad medical advice about 'healthy' diet and flu shots and start taking D3. I wonder if HUB would disappear if researchers would count ILIs that occur within the two-week post-jab period, that are not recorded as the adverse effect of immediate post-jab immunosuppression.
HUB plus 2week period after shots covers 60-90% of it.
Add in differential practices around testing , erroneous determinations of vaccine status and you are likely at95%
If I present this to a person with average understanding, including having been subject to massive propaganda over the last few years, I *expect* to get the response that the early vax rollout seemed to correlate with a decline in cases and hospitalizations, which presumably wouldn't involve the HUB, because older and sicker people were prioritized for access to this health-protecting treatment. I imagine you have a response, and I'd be very interested in hearing it.
The Bigger Picture...
You are right in one thing... people miss the bigger picture... and this includes you.
People like Robert Malone & Steven Kirsch are puppets of the puppet masters and hold back Humanity by focusing on Covid, Vax and shit like that.
I am the only one that has warned people about the dangers of NEURAL LACE BCI inside the shit shots.
You and all the others dismissed me and ignored my warnings.
For all others here is a reminder.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/klaus-schwab-darpa-harvard-elon-musk
And here
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/starlink-and-the-technomages
Now they are Transhumanists.
They want to connect Humanity to AI via BCI supplied through fake Vaxxination and lies.
You and all others dismissed me and Ignored me.
So I got a message for all of you.
I was right and you are wrong.
STARLINK is the central piece of their Empire.
But NEURAL LACE BCI has just advanced to such a point that your own personal nightmare is just around the corner.
https://www.inceptivemind.com/new-graphene-sensor-make-mind-control-robots-reality/30039/
Mind controlled Robots via NEURAL LACE BCI.
Thank you for nothing.
You are a disappointment to me.
Your greed & sucking up to the Wall street Fascists demonstrates your incapability to think for yourself.
I warned everyone.
I don't care anymore.
"This is why the HUB = WUB = EUB."
I have to disagree with this. I think that you are missing an important point. Many of those too sick to take vaccines are not poor or uneducated--they are likely in hospice or otherwise too sick to be injected. The Death's Door Bias isn't quite the same as the HUB, but the DDB likely plays a huge role in unvaccinated mortality.