Author Topic: Why can't liberals understand math?  (Read 1265 times)

Bogie

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Why can't liberals understand math?
« on: July 21, 2021, 10:16:56 PM »
Right now, the overall number of "covid victims" in the state of Missouri from the overall population, for a bug that is so contagious that everyone is gonna easily catch it, is 0.184% since the start of they hysteria.
 
And that number sends them into total freakout.
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makattak

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #1 on: July 21, 2021, 10:28:54 PM »
Because they are stupid.

Most are functionally innumerate.
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Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2021, 10:30:30 PM »
This one dude is PhD at a local high dollar college...
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Perd Hapley

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2021, 10:45:31 PM »
They could understand the facts if they wanted to, but the facts are the last thing some people care about.
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zxcvbob

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2021, 10:51:47 PM »
Math is racist.
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dogmush

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #5 on: July 22, 2021, 04:39:02 AM »
Right now, the overall number of "covid victims" in the state of Missouri from the overall population, for a bug that is so contagious that everyone is gonna easily catch it, is 0.184% since the start of they hysteria.
 
And that number sends them into total freakout.

No, it's not. 

Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #6 on: July 22, 2021, 06:59:07 AM »
Oops - you're right. I was looking at the national figure, which includes the fatalities from places like New York, where the politicians seeded the nursing homes. Missouri is only around 0.165%.
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dogmush

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #7 on: July 22, 2021, 07:33:57 AM »
Are you referring to "COVID victims " as only deaths?

Because slightly more than 10% of the people in Missouri have gotten COVID.

French G.

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #8 on: July 22, 2021, 07:40:08 AM »
Yes, he is referring to only deaths. Not a whole picture but more useful than a bs cases metric. Maybe include hospitalization too. Then there is the whole with rona vs of rona debate. The numbers are garbage, my state has over 10% of the deaths as probable.
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Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #9 on: July 22, 2021, 07:55:14 AM »
I'm using the concrete data. Population, etc... And nobody knows the true number of "cases," since many people who contracted it didn't bother, or need, to seek medical attention.
 
When you look at only presented cases - the sickest individuals - you're inflating the overall numbers. If it bleeds, it leads.

As a comparison - If you ride a motorcycle,  you have x-chance of death in a motorcycle/motor vehicle accident. If you don't, the chance is MUCH lower. But the media would only report the big numbers, and convince everyone that they were gonna die because of motorcycles - even if they didn't own one.
 
But seriously, given that many cases/deaths happened in skilled nursing facilities, etc., I'm wondering why it is so hard to find data on some things, such as DNR orders, morbidity factors, etc...
 
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K Frame

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #10 on: July 22, 2021, 07:56:23 AM »
They can't figure out what gender they are, and that's a 1/0 type of thing, so it's not surprising that they can't figure out something with multiple variables.
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HankB

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #11 on: July 22, 2021, 08:10:18 AM »
With the Federal budget process now underway, maybe it's a GOOD thing liberals don't understand math.

But please, nobody tell Biden/Pelosi et.al. what number comes after a trillion.
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dogmush

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #12 on: July 22, 2021, 09:43:35 AM »
I'm using the concrete data. Population, etc... And nobody knows the true number of "cases," since many people who contracted it didn't bother, or need, to seek medical attention.
 
When you look at only presented cases - the sickest individuals - you're inflating the overall numbers. If it bleeds, it leads.

...

I think you have that backwards.  If a bunch of people didn't bother to get tested/seek medical attention than the true number of cases is much higher than we think, not lower.

"Concrete" Data:

656,484 cumulative cases (folks that tested positive in a medical setting per Johns Hopkins)
6,137,000 people in Missouri (Google)

If you are claiming that a bunch or people probably didn't get tested, then the number of people infected in Missouri is likely higher than 10%.  That's pretty contagious.

If your argument is this contagious bug doesn't kill very many people, sure, but we would need data on serious side effects and long term effects, plus prevalence of "long haul" COVID vs quickly get over it COVID, to make any useful risk management decisions That data is hard to reliably come by,  for sure.

But in general the left is not any worse than math (at least COVID related math) than the right.  They just cherry pick different variables to support their preconceptions.

zahc

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #13 on: July 22, 2021, 09:46:50 AM »
Mocking aside, it's pretty well established that liberals are not any better than conservatives when it comes to estimating things about COVID. Even if you believe the official COVID numbers, the liberal on the street doesn't know the official COVID numbers any better than the conservative on the street and maybe is much further from reality. Such as estimating the hospitalization rate at 20% when it's closer to 2%. I see no reason why it shouldn't be true also for other politicized issues across the board besides COVID. And it's not surprising given the hysteria and soundbite media barrage, because people estimate things based on the sources of their information input (when I think about this it makes Scott Adam's "moist robot" theory sound reasonable).

If everyone didn't have a warped perception of reality (as objectively measurably they do), our republic would be in much better shape.

Personally I think this is a serious problem that might completely demolish our republic or Western liberal democracies altogether. The printing press resulted is sweeping societal changes and I don't see any reason why the internet can't/won't do the same. I'm struggling at this point to see how it will be an improvement though.
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Ben

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #14 on: July 22, 2021, 09:56:51 AM »
But in general the left is not any worse than math (at least COVID related math) than the right.  They just cherry pick different variables to support their preconceptions.

Certainly each side is working with nebulous numbers that can't really be verified. Regarding people who likely had the virus but didn't get tested, I could easily have been one of those. If I didn't have a couple of serious enough symptoms, different enough from a cold or flu, I would have never thought to get tested - I would have just stayed home and taken Theraflu and drank tea with honey.

I guess we can all take a stance on either side or in-between on which conceptions are worse. I lean towards over-reaction being worse, but part of that is coming from a guy who lives in the boonies instead of NYC. Geography and culture plays a big role on perception. I was shocked at everything I saw when I spent a good portion of April in California. I'm sure someone from LA would have been shocked to see how we treated the bioweapon where I lived. While in CA, one of my cousins told me that his daughter and her husband, who live in SF, have banned him from visiting and will not let him see his grandson until further notice. That has been going on since the start of the virus.
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MechAg94

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #15 on: July 22, 2021, 10:55:34 AM »
I think conservatives are more likely to distrust the official story/numbers than liberals and look for more information sources. 
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zahc

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #16 on: July 22, 2021, 11:06:06 AM »
I think conservatives are more likely to distrust the official story/numbers than liberals and look for more information sources.

Like I said, it's not true that liberals are trusting official information sources. It would be better if they did. Surveys show that liberals over-estimate the danger of the virus (vs. official numbers) by a very large margin. For some metrics, the average liberal is wrong by many times. It's not that they are trusting the official numbers. They are way off even from the official numbers. Conservatives are wrong vs. the official numbers too but they are closer. So despite all the rhetoric conservatives are the group more in line with the "scientific consensus" and closer to the official numbers.
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WLJ

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #17 on: July 22, 2021, 11:26:26 AM »
They understand math very well, it's just not your math.

Your math: 2 + 2 = 4
Their math: 2 + 2 = Whatever it needs to be to demonstrate how racist you are.
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dogmush

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #18 on: July 22, 2021, 11:46:17 AM »
Zahc's not wrong.  I think any strong political leaning in your life has been picked up by the algorithms and is resulting in a very warped sense of reality and the information you get.  It's very time consuming and difficult to get out of that.

And while the political right's COVID preconceptions are closer to the official numbers, I think we all agree that those numbers aren't particularly great, so I'm not sure being closer is the same as correct.

People are living in VASTLY different information landscapes depending on political leanings, so it's not surprising they come to very different conclusions on the answers that are needed.


grampster

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #19 on: July 22, 2021, 10:42:25 PM »
Let's just deal with this on the KISS system.  Everyone who got sick had Covid.  Everyone who did not get sick also had Covid.  Everybody who died, died from Covid.  Everyone who didn't die also had Covid but lived.

 There I fixed it for you.  Keeping It Simple Stupid.
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Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #20 on: July 23, 2021, 01:45:16 AM »
I think you have that backwards.  If a bunch of people didn't bother to get tested/seek medical attention than the true number of cases is much higher than we think, not lower.

"Concrete" Data:

656,484 cumulative cases (folks that tested positive in a medical setting per Johns Hopkins)
6,137,000 people in Missouri (Google)

If you are claiming that a bunch or people probably didn't get tested, then the number of people infected in Missouri is likely higher than 10%.  That's pretty contagious.

If your argument is this contagious bug doesn't kill very many people, sure, but we would need data on serious side effects and long term effects, plus prevalence of "long haul" COVID vs quickly get over it COVID, to make any useful risk management decisions That data is hard to reliably come by,  for sure.

But in general the left is not any worse than math (at least COVID related math) than the right.  They just cherry pick different variables to support their preconceptions.

Uh... Right. For most people, it is a little case of the snifflies. For a few more, it is a cold. For a very few out of that group, it's a nasty cold.
 
And nasty colds kill the hell out of geezers.
 
Most of the dead are well over age 70. Many of them terminally ill. Many of those with DNR orders on file.
 
I wonder how much of the "long haul" stuff is hysteria.
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dogmush

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #21 on: July 23, 2021, 04:54:59 AM »
57% of the dead are over age 75.  Would you care to quantify terminal illness  and DNR numbers since we were discussing math?

French G.

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #22 on: July 23, 2021, 07:59:34 AM »
No one is good at large numbers, especially when scary headlines conflate numbers and rates or do things like percentage increase in cases. I tend to convert things to a per 100k number since healthcare and my old field of aviation think like that.

For lay chatting I will convert to a risk or event already considered by the conversationalists. I took pains to never call it a hoax to my child while explaining that much of the coverage was fear driven sensationalism. I told her that in her age group the chance of dying was the same as being struck by lightning. We don’t alter our lives for that risk but we also don’t run around holding metal poles in a storm. For me the risk was about the same as my chance of dying on my somewhat dodgy commute. We don’t stop going out but we do take reasonable precautions. My Dad’s chances were not good. Standard issue hospital pneumonia nearly killed him a few times. We didn’t visit for a damn long time. If people could turn off the news and make decent individual risk based decisions we would have done a lot better.
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I'm so contrarian that I didn't respond to the thread.

Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #23 on: July 23, 2021, 09:34:14 AM »
More demographics on the dead are hard to get - I'll dig a bit more, but most of the scuttlebutt I'm hearing from healthcare folks in the City is that bunches were hospice patients, in SNFs, etc... BTW, you don't want to work in an SNF...
 
It was a perfect propaganda storm... The Chinese HAD to have a lot of victims to cover for removing the Hong Kong problem. Everything about it was exaggerated, and we bought it all. I'm still seeing folks wearing multiple masks, and whatever gloves, and side-eyeing everyone they come into contact with. They'll dance around if you sneeze. And St. Louis is a mega allergy place.
 
I'll predict that we're going to see lower geriatric morbidity for a bit, because the low hanging fruit just got picked. And padded to statistics (yeah, I'm gonna say it that way on purpose).
 
A friend's mother died with it. She had two types of cancer and MS, and was well over 70, very frail, darn near completely bedridden. Prognosis wasn't good to start with. They think she caught it during a chemo session.
 
If you're not a bedridden octogenarian... then again, the outlier situations make the news. I wonder how many of the  younger people who caught it and died were killed by the treatment rather than the bug - From what I read, some patients were put on vents because the facilities thought it was a safety measure for the help regarding filtration of outgoing air... And vents kill the hell out of people. They are very hard to come back from. That's the "scarring and lasting damage" right there.
 
It's like the media looked at base jumping, and then extrapolated the statistics to everyone. I can firmly tell you that I have virtually ZERO chance of dying from base jumping. Or bull riding.
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Bogie

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Re: Why can't liberals understand math?
« Reply #24 on: July 23, 2021, 09:53:27 AM »
Keep in mind too that 99% of the "precautions" were basically nothing but handwavium. "You need to do this so that you feel like you are doing something."
 
Buses were still dropping off and picking up workers from a large inpatient psych facility near me during the "worst" of it. Seriously?

I see cashiers wearing gloves... And they, and their managers, get really bent out of shape when I ask them to change the gloves after they are done with the customer before me. Gee, if you're gonna do something, do it correctly. The bug isn't transferred via skin contact, so those gloves are there for... some reason...
 
I've had people come in the store with a spray bottle of _something_ and walk around spraying it ahead of themselves. And they LOVE the bottle of "hand sanitizer" in the front of the store - they pretty much all handle the outside.
 
You can go in a restaurant, but you have to wear a mask that doesn't block anything to walk to your table or go to the restroom. As for the mask efficacy at blocking viral particles - I'm sure it improved somewhat with humidity, but most of the things are somewhat akin to the chain link fence between you and a psycho 12 year old with a Red Ryder... And some, it seems, would actually increase viral dispersion. But Karen was still wearing them, to show that she cared about showing that she cared about showing that she cared.
 
I have pretty much quit caring.
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