Food for thought or Straw man fallacy?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2016/01/05/what-does-it-actually-mean-when-somebody-complains-about-political-correctness/

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/01/07/social-justice-warriors-wreaking-havoc-in-open-source-software/

It may be below the radar for some, but it runs the infrastructure.

How would you handle this if you were the school?

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/high-school-calls-out-kids-with-lunch-balances-203559666.html

The stupid...it burns: "What If Eating Meat Was Considered Sexist?"

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/what-if-eating-meat-was-considered-sexist

There are no tickets available to people who are not specifically invited to the event.

"This is an invitation-only event. No tickets are available," the memo states. "The event is not open to the public."

That's not a town hall, that's a Potemkin Village Meet-and-Greet.

Food for thought or Straw man fallacy?

That can be put in as the picture of Mr. Straw Man in his Wikipedia entry.

Hey Amy, you don't seem to know much math or statistics, but have you seen this? http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/17/1520109113.full.pdf
It invalidates a lot of evo-psych theories and research (probably all) and I think you should comment on it.

At ECU, hugs, neck rubs could be 'sexual battery'.

Joe Biden hardest hit.

It invalidates a lot of

Full stop, right there.

There are too many studies that can not be reproduced. Get back to us when it has been reproduced.

Here, have a taste (emphasis mine):

Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.

Similar results can be found in the "hard" sciences as well. I recall an article detailing someone in industry trying to apply results from scholarly papers to come up with new products or methods, and failing. Sometimes, when contacting the lead author, they discovered that they got a good result and ran with it. Something to get published, but rubbish otherwise.

Also: unless a statistician is in the author list, you should understand that these people did the statistical calculations, but are not subject matter experts. They fed the data to a program, and got some graphs and descriptive stats. They assume they did the analysis correctly, which goes into the yeah, maybe category. From personal experience, it is ridiculously easy to make an error and not notice it, be it in your data, your methodology, or your statistical analysis.

And the earlier your error occurs, the greater the effect it will have on your results.

As a statistician I know is fond of saying, being a statistician means never having to say you're certain. I'll let Feynman have the last word:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...

Since gambling was mentioned, I'll repeat this from a month ago:

Old reason for not playing state lotteries: Gambling is a bad habit, it preys on the poor, etc.

New reason for not playing state lotteries: Because they're rigged.

How would you handle this if you were the school? ~ Posted by: N at January 8, 2016 5:15 AM

“If you owe $25 or more on your lunch account, this is what Kokomo High School provides you for lunch. Two slices of bread and two slices of cheese. Absolutely mortifying. My heart goes out to the kids that I go to school with that get their only meal a day at school.”

How is it the school's job to provide the "only meal a day" and when did it become heartless to expect families to pony up for their kids' lunches?

And what are the parents doing with the money the isn't going into feeding their children? We have SNAP and other welfare programs to help those who can't afford to feed their children. When did the school system become a welfare program.

Do we really have a large number of families that can't afford at least two meals a day for their children?

And when did a cheese or peanut butter sandwich become "absolutely mortifying?" When I was a kid, your own parents would send you to school with cheese or peanut butter sandwiches in a brown paper sack (or a Superman lunch box). Now, we're to turn our noses up at them.

re. the school lunches: If the student's family is low-income, they probably qualify for free or reduced lunches anyway. And if they're at over $25, they've not been paying for at least two weeks, since cafeteria lunches tend to cost around $2.

My kid decides if she want to take her lunch or eat cafeteria food based on the menu for the day. If her prepaid account runs out (which has happened once) they send a note home right away. They certainly don't let it get high enough that she'd get cut off.

It's "mortifying" to have something you haven't paid for taken away? Could we be a little more entitled?

And when did a cheese or peanut butter sandwich become "absolutely mortifying?"

Anyone who turns their nose up at free food is not actually, you know, hungry. It may not be your first choice, or second, or third, but you will eat it and be happier.

Not only did I carry a lunchbox, it was a steel lunchbox. And it usually contained a PB&J, a thermos with milk, and I think some sort of fruit. My dad also carried a lunchbox, but his was bigger, less flashy, and probably had two PB&J's, and a thermos, maybe coffee or water.

I hear radio ads on a fairly regular basis. One of which tells us the hunger in America is a problem for 1/6th of children. I'll hear a different ad that claims that 1/6th of children are overweight.

Sounds like a food distribution problem.

Q: What will you buy if you won the Powerball lottery?

A: a bunch of hookers and cocaine.

My problem with this story? They wait until after they get the food. Which means that tray of uneaten food goes in the trash. How the fuck does that save money? Also knowing this why can't kids in the red eat while in line and get part of their meal for free?

Why not check them off the list as they ENTER the line?

Ah, another lovely day in the City of Brotherly Love with an adherent of the Religion of Peace.

More international chaos! According to The Telegraph:

Two days after Pyongyang caused outrage by test-firing a nuclear bomb, South Korea used giant loudspeakers set up at the border to play songs by Seoul's top boy bands.

Said loudspeakers are capable of broadcasting sound as far as 20 miles. That's got to be a violation of some-or-another standard of international decency. Oh, by the way, be sure to read down to the bottom for a sidebar on the Happy Fat Guy's varied accomplishments and addictions.

"Hey Amy, you don't seem to know much math or statistics, but have you seen this?"

I may be too old for today's language and admit that it is sometimes easy to confuse me (like eating meat is sexist). I have to ask - Joakim, why are you here?

Said loudspeakers are capable of broadcasting sound as far as 20 miles.

As long as they're more than 20 miles away from Amy's house, does anyone really care?

"mortifying"?

Let's see which is more mortifying, a multiple choice game:

A: Being denied a "better" lunch because your parents/guardians have screwed up and not paid for your last two weeks of lunches (and yet you still get a lunch of bread and cheese).

B: Having a country to your north that has been ruled by crazy-ass dictators for decades and the current bossman is claiming to have set off a hydrogen bomb so bossman can show all the other crazies in his government that he is in charge. "And the loudspeakers propaganda from the capitalist pigs in the south be damned; we will send our army down there one day to liberate them!"

C: Living in that northern neighbor country run by the crazies where due to famine people have resorted to cannibalism at times; so that "mortifying" lunch of bread and cheese looks pretty damn good.

Hmmm, decisions, decisions, decisions. Oh how hard it is to live in the first world - I guess I'll have to choose unlisted Option D to pay for my kid's lunch or make them one to bring from home Ha! My white male privilege made me think of that one.