Okay, I had originally made the thread regarding a specific episode, but I've been watching more of the show and damn it I like it a lot. And there's a lot worth talking about.
I just now watched the episode about recycling. I feel a little mind-blown, but I think I'm gonna look up whatever I can to verify things. It seemed rather on the ball at face value though.
It's not, though. The problem is that Penn's not above distorting the truth for his own purposes. His main tool here is controlling what appears and doesn't appear on the show, omitting "inconvenient facts" from being shown. He's not above using bad data either, which is why he had a massive scandal over the secondhand smoking episode when he got caught basically laundering the findings of Big Tobacco's pet scientist.
Basically, as I said in my thread on this topic two years ago, there are two sorts of episodes. The first is where he goes after a group which is very deserving of scorn, in which case he just gives them enough rope to hang themselves in front of the camera. The other is where he tries to take on a polarizing issue, where he tries to push his side as the One Truth. This is where he fails, and comes across as an egotistical blowhard.
Yeah, pretty much this.
I file this show in the same mental category as Mythbusters. It's docu-tainment, emphasis on the entertainment. It's often wrong, and sometimes when it's right, it's right for the wrong reasons.
Still pretty fun to watch, though, as long as you don't take it too seriously.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't really see a point to actually banning the sale of any games to children.
Now, the funny thing is that this small part of jack's crusade I actually agree with. ...
That's fine. If a game contains graphic violence, coarse language and nudity, it shouldn't be sold to children.
Here's the rub, though: there are two senses to the word "ban."
There's a "ban" as with movies, which isn't really a ban, just a willing agreement by theaters and retailers to check ID before selling an R-rated movie or a movie ticket to a minor. If somebody violates that agreement they might lose privileges with the MPAA but they're not breaking the law.
Then there's a "ban" as in 'we want to make it illegal to sell explicit content to minors.' That's what Jack wants to do... but you can't do that because of this little itty bitty thing called the First Amendment.
If the whole games industry got together with the ESRB and said "We're going to mutally agree not to sell M-rated games to minors," that's great. Lovely! Wonderful! I'm all about that.
When you start trying to use the authority of the law, then it becomes censorship, and I'm against that.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited July 2009
Damn, Feral beat me to it.
But yeah. The movie system is entirely voluntary, is broken with some regularity, and society has notably failed to fall apart at the seams.
I don't really see a point to actually banning the sale of any games to children.
Now, the funny thing is that this small part of jack's crusade I actually agree with. ...
That's fine. If a game contains graphic violence, coarse language and nudity, it shouldn't be sold to children.
Here's the rub, though: there are two senses to the word "ban."
There's a "ban" as with movies, which isn't really a ban, just a willing agreement by theaters and retailers to check ID before selling an R-rated movie or a movie ticket to a minor. If somebody violates that agreement they might lose privileges with the MPAA but they're not breaking the law.
Then there's a "ban" as in 'we want to make it illegal to sell explicit content to minors.' That's what Jack wants to do... but you can't do that because of this little itty bitty thing called the First Amendment.
If the whole games industry got together with the ESRB and said "We're going to mutally agree not to sell M-rated games to minors," that's great. Lovely! Wonderful! I'm all about that.
When you start trying to use the authority of the law, then it becomes censorship, and I'm against that.
The first amendment doesn't prevent them from locking you up for selling porn to minors though does it? How couldn't they use the same justification for other explicit content that would contribute to the delinquency of a minor?
Libertarians often seem to have problems with the issues of recycling and passive smoking. I think it was South Park that had a bit of controversy because of some off-key episode about passive smoking, and its creators are libertarians too. It seems to me that generally Penn and Teller's episodes work, but their Libertarian ideology of letting people do what they want even if it harms them doesn't take into account things that harm other people, or society in general. And that's where the bad data and specious arguments come in to contort the facts to fit the viewpoints.
I don't really see a point to actually banning the sale of any games to children.
Now, the funny thing is that this small part of jack's crusade I actually agree with. ...
That's fine. If a game contains graphic violence, coarse language and nudity, it shouldn't be sold to children.
Here's the rub, though: there are two senses to the word "ban."
There's a "ban" as with movies, which isn't really a ban, just a willing agreement by theaters and retailers to check ID before selling an R-rated movie or a movie ticket to a minor. If somebody violates that agreement they might lose privileges with the MPAA but they're not breaking the law.
Then there's a "ban" as in 'we want to make it illegal to sell explicit content to minors.' That's what Jack wants to do... but you can't do that because of this little itty bitty thing called the First Amendment.
If the whole games industry got together with the ESRB and said "We're going to mutally agree not to sell M-rated games to minors," that's great. Lovely! Wonderful! I'm all about that.
When you start trying to use the authority of the law, then it becomes censorship, and I'm against that.
The first amendment doesn't prevent them from locking you up for selling porn to minors though does it? How couldn't they use the same justification for other explicit content that would contribute to the delinquency of a minor?
The porno 'decency' laws are unconstitutional in the first place and is government censorship which is absolutely retarded.
As with any philosophy a moderation of it use is the best bet. This applies to libertarian ideas, obviously you have to regulate power (by power I mean the ethreal kind) and it's ability to subjugate others or your freedom is just an illusion and the strongest are the only real free people. This disjunction with the purist libertarian idealism and libertarian pragmaticism is the difference between penn and teller and other libertarians. They understand it's not pragmatic to allow everything no matter what, but they're constitutional purists. The freedoms guarenteed in the constituion are what they lecture towards.
Further they dispell ideals that people have about the danger of X by comparing it to the accepted Y and realize that the danger of Y is greater than that of X therefore why isn't X legal? As far as video games go there is no danger. All sports pose more hazardous influences to children than video games, further sport stars often have some sort of survival of the fittest philosophy that puts them on the top and many teachers groom that ideal. Smoking is hazardous to your health but there's no evidence that second hand smoking causes any of the same problems (from a chemist point of view the diffusion of the smoke exhaled or drifting is almost instantaneous). This same theme is repeated by them over and over.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
The first amendment doesn't prevent them from locking you up for selling porn to minors though does it? How couldn't they use the same justification for other explicit content that would contribute to the delinquency of a minor?
I don't know if anybody's ever been convicted of CDM for giving porn to a minor. Generally, CDM is reserved for cases where you help a minor break the law - if it's not against the law for a minor to have porn, then it's not CDM to give a minor porn. I might be wrong about that, though, considering how vague CDM laws are and how loose the courts play them.
In any case, I think such things are covered under the obscenity exemptions to the First Amendment. I think you would have a very hard time arguing that most M-rated video games like GTA are obscenity under the Miller Test.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Libertarians often seem to have problems with the issues of recycling and passive smoking. I think it was South Park that had a bit of controversy because of some off-key episode about passive smoking, and its creators are libertarians too. It seems to me that generally Penn and Teller's episodes work, but their Libertarian ideology of letting people do what they want even if it harms them doesn't take into account things that harm other people, or society in general. And that's where the bad data and specious arguments come in to contort the facts to fit the viewpoints.
That problem can be summed up simply as "you may not believe in society, but rest assured, society definitely believes in you." But Penn's problem goes beyond that as well - if you watch the Wal-Mart episode, there are several times that he actually outright evades the questions put to him by the people opposed to him. A good example of this is when Greenwald brings up the fact that Wal-Mart uses scheduling as a punative measure, and Penn responds with a completely nonsensical rant about how Greenwald's editor has a schedule. It sounds like he's responding on a high level, but if you actually look at it, he's actually outright dodging the question, ignoring Greenwald's point completely.
The fundamental problem with most libertarians is they fail to recognise the dichotomy between so-called "positive freedoms" and "negative freedoms". The positive and negative isn't meant to describe the quality of the freedoms, but rather their nature. Positive freedoms are the freedoms to do something. Negative freedoms are the freedoms from something. A positive freedom is the right to own guns. A negative freedom is the right to not get shot.
Libertarians only focus on those positive freedoms and almost completely ignore the negative freedoms. Unfortunately, in the real world, a lot of negative freedoms are mutually exclusive from the positive freedoms. The whole second-hand smoke is a great example. I have the negative freedom from being injured by someone blowing their toxic smoke my way. However, they ignore that and they focus on the positive freedom that they got has to smoke.
To be fair, in a recent episode (or at least a episode i just finished rewatching season 1-4) Penn admitted that he was wrong about second hand smoke.
Which is both a cop-out and an attempt to avoid the actual issue of what happened there. The problem wasn't that he was wrong about secondhand smoke, it was that he got caught laundering the "research" of a known discredited hack of a scientist who made his career as being a stooge of Big Tobacco. There's a big difference.
The fundamental problem with most libertarians is they fail to recognise the dichotomy between so-called "positive freedoms" and "negative freedoms". The positive and negative isn't meant to describe the quality of the freedoms, but rather their nature. Positive freedoms are the freedoms to do something. Negative freedoms are the freedoms from something. A positive freedom is the right to own guns. A negative freedom is the right to not get shot.
Libertarians only focus on those positive freedoms and almost completely ignore the negative freedoms. Unfortunately, in the real world, a lot of negative freedoms are mutually exclusive from the positive freedoms. The whole second-hand smoke is a great example. I have the negative freedom from being injured by someone blowing their toxic smoke my way. However, they ignore that and they focus on the positive freedom that they got has to smoke.
Well, in all honesty, I would argue that this is a linguistic artifact of the multiple definitions of the word "freedom." Freedom from harm and freedom to exercise one's rights aren't necessarily equivalent.
That said, if we acknowledge that a fundamental purpose of government is to guarantee certain freedoms - freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to pursue a career, freedom to raise a family - then the most direct threat to those freedoms today come not from men wielding guns, but from men using money like a carrot and stick. There's no freedom of religion if all the housing in your community is owned by Mormons who will find a way to put your ass out on the street if you speak ill about Jesus. There's no freedom of speech if you have to worry that your employer is going to fire you for attending a political rally in your free time. Threat of homelessness, threat of starvation, threat of poverty just as chilling as the threat of arrest.
Libertarians don't acknowledge the power of money in any way more than lip service. The only power worth discussion in their worldview is the power of physical force, and the powers of the government as backed up by the threat of physical force. This is incredibly myopic in my opinion.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Libertarians often seem to have problems with the issues of recycling and passive smoking. I think it was South Park that had a bit of controversy because of some off-key episode about passive smoking, and its creators are libertarians too. It seems to me that generally Penn and Teller's episodes work, but their Libertarian ideology of letting people do what they want even if it harms them doesn't take into account things that harm other people, or society in general. And that's where the bad data and specious arguments come in to contort the facts to fit the viewpoints.
That problem can be summed up simply as "you may not believe in society, but rest assured, society definitely believes in you." But Penn's problem goes beyond that as well - if you watch the Wal-Mart episode, there are several times that he actually outright evades the questions put to him by the people opposed to him. A good example of this is when Greenwald brings up the fact that Wal-Mart uses scheduling as a punative measure, and Penn responds with a completely nonsensical rant about how Greenwald's editor has a schedule. It sounds like he's responding on a high level, but if you actually look at it, he's actually outright dodging the question, ignoring Greenwald's point completely.
WalMart doesn't practice that on a mass scale, WalMart practices it from manager to manager. The store policies can be completely different depending on where you go and the demand for workers. It's usually a bad policy to have a hostile work environment but even so walmart pays it's workers the best starting wage of any retail store. Almost all of the naysayer's claims about walmart are either practiced by most retail stores or retarded.
As for second hand smoke can someone link me to the actual numbers? In med school we are taught it's 1:100k without and 1:80k risk of death with and without it with which amounts to no statistical evidence of actual second hand smoke so it'd be neat if that was wrong.
Also for your pos freedoms vs negative freedoms I agree, but no you don't have the right to not be shot because being shot when guns are legal is far less likely to happen than being shot when guns aren't but the black market sells them. Violent crimes and murders don't decrease with the illegalization of guns and many criminals who have guns when ordinary civilians (and in some first world countries even basic law enforcement) can't carry guns are completely untouchable. The thing I would disagree with is how you sort out the positive freedoms and negative freedoms.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
WalMart doesn't practice that on a mass scale, WalMart practices it from manager to manager.
I hear gang lieutenants using that logic all the time. We don't encourage it, lots of employees, shit happens, blah blah blah.
By the same logic you just implicated every regimented organization which (hate to say it) is nearly every one of them. Internal affairs is always going to be one step behind the person who breaks the laws. The difference is walmark makes an active attempt to keep it to a minimum and bad managers don't last long. Further with over 70% of the management starting on floor jobs most managers are far more empathetic than with other companies which typically hire far hire percentage of out group management. You have to realize Walmart is THE LARGEST company in the world employing more people than many countries have population. Just like anything the larger the scale you do it on the more and more isolated instances of something going wrong will appear.
Walmart pays it's employees total around 100+ billion a year. Restricting something that large and that influential is asking over a million employees to find a better job and the fact of the matter is almost no jobs pay on average 10 bucks an hour. The national minimum wage is around 5.50 and the starting wage for walmart is around 10. Stop fucking complaining.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Also for your pos freedoms vs negative freedoms I agree, but no you don't have the right to not be shot because being shot when guns are legal is far less likely to happen than being shot when guns aren't but the black market sells them. Violent crimes and murders don't decrease with the illegalization of guns and many criminals who have guns when ordinary civilians (and in some first world countries even basic law enforcement) can't carry guns are completely untouchable. The thing I would disagree with is how you sort out the positive freedoms and negative freedoms.
Umm I don't entirely know what you mean here.
I understand I don't have a right to be shot but I do have a right to life and surely that life is put more at risk by a culture where guns are everywhere and are actively used?
Isn't the gun deaths total of the UK (a country with little gun ownership) much lower as a proportion than the US? Criminals who have guns in this country are not untouchable, they get caught just as well as if every policeman had an assault rifle.
Violent crimes and murders don't decrease with the illegalization of guns
This, however, is a perfectly debatable assertion.
His Corkiness on
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited July 2009
The best example of this is Japan.
They have an insanely restrictive approach to guns, where a swat team will happily raid houses even just suspected of having guns, and this has resulted in next to no shootings. The question is if one is willing to put up with that level of possible invasiveness in return for that level of safety.
oh one hand they presented a valid reason that lie detectors are bullshit, given the quite low succes rate of them (althrough that is debatable, I read up on it and some research say they are right 90% of the time while other research says it's at 60% thus being only a little big higher than just guessing)
but the whole part with the cupple, I mean the guy was more than clearly lying, hell you could see it before he even went to the fraking test and he got what he deserved, so i don't know why the show tried to make the viewer feel sympathy for him
Violent crimes and murders don't decrease with the illegalization of guns
This, however, is a perfectly debatable assertion.
I was struggling with wording my argumnt TBH.
In areas where no guns are allowed especially ones where criminals can get them in black markets criminals are largely nonpunishable and nondeterable. No one with a gun is going to flip out about a shopkeep with a bat. A major reason that guns should be legalized is because they exist. By illegalizing them you simply take guns out of the hands of the non criminal and create an even larger black market for the already booming underground gun trade. When you have criminals with guns and civilians without bad things happen.
Further by making guns illegal you only decrease the chance of death by firearm by .1%. Which to science is statistically irrelevant. Of course politicians will tell you that you have 1000% more chance of death by firearm in the US than you do in UK which is true but all you're doing is changing the way you look at the numbers when you have such a small number to deal with any difference can be a huge percentage. A difference which is irrelevant because science says there's no way to say whether it's cultural, population density etc. Further you're trading a statistical irrelevant number (which there's no way to say if you were to make it illegal if it would actually go the way of the the UK) for another statistically irrelevant number of people victimized by violent crimes.
Making an argument against guns makes no logical sense considering how low on the totem pole they are. Further finding a statistic of their deaths that excludes suicide (about 60% of all gun related fatalities are suicide) and police shootings/defensive killing (about 15% more) is nearly impossible. It's important to note that in a country with some 330,000,000 people that means around ~7-8k die a year from criminal activity involving guns most of which is related to intercity gang vs gang violence.
Asian/African/South American statistics are not applicable to America either because of huge paradigm shifts on what is acceptable or not. Japan is a police state where every crime is a major one and that's how they keep their people in control. Mexico's military is mobilized just to keep the country from devolving into anarchy. Africans regularly kill each other for food.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited July 2009
I'm going to go ahead and link PantsB's post from the Senate Gun thread. Because clearly someone has no idea what they're talking about. And my money is on Elfdude. PantsB has pictures.
Its reasonable to debate the exact correlation between gun ownership and gun crime (for example the well cited examples of Canada and Switzerland) but whats not up for debate is surely that the US has a problem with using guns?
In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States - over 80 deaths every day
In a table of selected developed countries 3.98 people died per 100,000 of the population while the next closest was Italy with 0.51 per 100,000. Only in Switzerland were gun related suicides the only comparable statistic to American gun ownership statistics (this is a country with between 1.2-3 million guns and a population of 7.7million people)
I'm not saying that guns kill people directly, i'm not even saying americans are lunatics but I'm saying that you seem to have a readiness to reach to a gun and a consequent disregard for the consequences of guns. Other countries seem able to balance dangerous weapons and social control but something seems to be going wrong in America.
tldr version: I disagree with your assertion that countries with lack of guns are inhernetly more dangerous place or that a gun is necesary to protect you from crime.
I'm going to go ahead and link PantsB's post from the Senate Gun thread. Because clearly someone has no idea what they're talking about. And my money is on Elfdude. PantsB has pictures.
No idea what statistically significant means huh? It means that the small number is TOO (gun deaths) small to be accurately compared to the big number (population). 10 in 100,000 is statistically insignificant to 1 in 100,000. The chance of dying from a gun death is .0001 or .00001 and the difference between those two numbers is .1. But if you keep it in the big number method you can make the assertion that you have 1000% more chance to die in the US than the UK from guns, which is a half truth but indicates more of a political agenda than a real number. Both numbers are unreliable in comparison to the context they're taken from. Also 26k gun deaths takes into account ALL deaths that guns are involved in. 60% of that is SUICIDE rates. The USA as of 2008 has a 3.5 deaths due to homicide, 6 deaths related to suicide and .5 deaths related to other per 100,000. Which is a total of 10 per 100,000. Of those 3.5 homicide rates around 70% are gang related violence. That means if we take away our guns our actual gun crime rate would drop to about 1 per 100,000 which it is at anyways because suicides will always suicide regardless of getting rid of guns and gang violence before the advent of reliable hand guns involved very bloody en masse knife fights which were far more deadly.
Again I did point those statistics out which the numbers your guy provides are also based off of so maybe looking at what I said and what he said might be important huh?
Also all I can say from reading his post is it's a good thing there wasn't a statistician in that thread who could show him why every number he quoted was as good as bunk.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited July 2009
Actually, I DO know what statistically significant means. But it's clear that you don't.
1 in 100,000 and 10 in 100,000 is tenfold greater, which is not a 0.1% difference. The percentage for the former is 0.001% and the latter 0.01% which is a difference of 0.009% whether or not this is statistically significant depends on the base rates and standard deviations of the numbers involved. There's no magic number which which things cross the threshold of being statistically significant, or not. Given the base rate in this case in this case is small, the standard deviation is likewise small, and the difference IS statistically significant. The fact that the difference in scale is 10 or 1000% this is not insignificant.
I like how your post assumes that actuaries are gibbering retards who can't actually determine statistical signfiicance without your help.
When you have criminals with guns and civilians without bad things happen.
I see this argument a lot, but given that none of the first world nations who've banned civilian firearms seem to suffer from skyrocketing murder, robbery or generic bad things rates, i'm partial to the opinion that the argument is full of crap.
psycojester on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited July 2009
The phrase "Statistically different" as it is commonly used is a human judgement. By the actual numbers it just means different, like Apotheosis said.
For example, I judge that those numbers are so small as to not mean bunk. The difference is so small that it's very weasely to claim it means anything. It's like a highly technical morality argument that makes you go o_O even though all the logic is correct. It's technically significant but its meaningless from a human standpoint.
In psychology there are specific, rather abritrary, values of difference called statistically significant which is probably what elfdude is trying to say.
But he's forgotten the most important point: that the words "statistically different" there is a human judgement, not a pure numbers thing.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I do understand statistical relevance. I'm not claiming that guns are linked to deaths (outside the obvious) but that the drastic anomoly that is the US in these areas points to the country as a whole having a different attitude towards violence and a ability to act out that violence on those around them.
28,000 people is an awful lot of people bigger than most moderately sized towns. Around 57 people in the UK died from gun crime last year, thats still 57 too many. The US population is only 6 times larger than the UK's at best estimate yet British people are not less likely to punch you or beat you up than anyone else in the world. We still have violent crime. Its not that you are more likely to be violent just that the type of violence you perpetrate is so much more devestating.
Adding guns to a situation adds uncertaintity to it. Unless you've shot someone before you can never appreciate the disproportionate carnage such a small item can cause. Americans don't seem able to seperate what happens when you point a gun at someone and the actual consequences of doing so. Neither do other people when they stab them or punch someone but the results of a gunshot are surely much harder to undo?
Also, so what if most of the gun grime is gang based? They're still people, just because they are in gangs and in poverty they shouldn't count in the statistics.
Spindizzy on
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited July 2009
The most important thing about statistical significance is that it can be significant and be completely meaningless.
So if somebody says something is statistically significant, that's not enough. They can't just end it there. They then need to justify why this arbitrary numbers difference is meaningful.
Most important thing to remember about statistics right there.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Additionally, this is something involving people (alot of people), for example Swine Flu is estimated to kill around 0.5% of the population worldwide, although it doesn't sound alot its still (this is a memery based guess) around 4million people, even if you increased that to 5% its still not enough to have an overall impact upon the general meaningful and relevant lives of the whole world. But its still a damn large number of people that are dead because of a rogue factor. Guns are a rogue factor.
This thread needs to couch all of its discussion in terms of the actual show or else it's going to wind up a discussion of pretty much every topic in the entire universe. And Unc'a Jeff doesn't much care for that idea.
Obviously watching Penn and Teller has a bias towards it. EVERY SINGLE THING DOES. I think P&T is a good show because it's entertaining. Most of the information on it is "true" with a spin on it. But really if you watch the show and use them as a reference to prove a point, I'll call you an idiot.
Anyway, like I said, Penn and Teller are douchenozzles and I don't even know what Teller's role is on the show except to put on stupid hats and make stupid faces now and then.
Anyway, like I said, Penn and Teller are douchenozzles and I don't even know what Teller's role is on the show except to put on stupid hats and make stupid faces now and then.
You're lucky your avatar is awesome, else I'd hate you to death.
But really, what episode did they run that made you hate them? Had to be the smoking one right? :P
Actually, I DO know what statistically significant means. But it's clear that you don't.
1 in 100,000 and 10 in 100,000 is tenfold greater, which is not a 0.1% difference. The percentage for the former is 0.001% and the latter 0.01% which is a difference of 0.009% whether or not this is statistically significant depends on the base rates and standard deviations of the numbers involved. There's no magic number which which things cross the threshold of being statistically significant, or not. Given the base rate in this case in this case is small, the standard deviation is likewise small, and the difference IS statistically significant. The fact that the difference in scale is 10 or 1000% this is not insignificant.
I like how your post assumes that actuaries are gibbering retards who can't actually determine statistical signfiicance without your help.
.1% difference was a typo i corrected it within a few minutes of posting but not fast enough it seems. Also again why it's not statistically significant is because the small number (gundeaths) is being related to a overtly large number (population). In modern science this relationship is rejected as evidence for a specific reason. False positives, skewed results, Familywise error rate, False Discovery rate, TYPE I, TYPE II errors all could easily produce the difference in data. Since The per capita rate of gun murder in the US is .01% and the per capita gun murder rate of england is .001% neither is scientifically applicable data. As such you can make spurious claims related to the data and make claims as to why it is but it is impossible to prove that it's gun control that is the contributor to this. While I don't have any doubt that gun control at least plays a major role in it we cannot guarantee or even establish that it will have any effect on America. Again, when eliminating suicide our number drops to about 4 in 100,000 which, eliminate the .5 that are deaths related to cops and that's 3.5 then eliminate another 70% that's related to gang violence and that means that the US's per capita death by firearm rate is around .7 in 100,000 which is more applicable to the world. This .7-.5 will never go away and it's dumb to expect suicides to go away without the aide of a gun for obvious reasons as well as police inspired fatalities, it's also dumb to expect gang related violence to go down either. That means in actuality you're taking care of around .2 max in 100,000 homicides (if any). For comparison there's around 153 deaths per 100,000 due to cancer. 300 in 100,000 due to heart disease, 10 per 100,000 because of diabetus, 20 in 100,000 due to accidental chance.
To put it in perspective the murder rate in the UK is ~1 in 100,000 the murder rate in the US is ~4 in 100,000 (look it's much lower than the number of gun deaths) 3.5 of that number is from guns (half of the UK's is from guns) but ~3 of that number is gang related violence which is doubtful to disappear. Meaning by getting rid of guns you're saving no innocents from murder and you're creating a black market economy and your setting a precedents that the bill of rights can be rewritten and to stop that minority of murders you're taking away guns from the millions of owners in America.
Tell me what you're actually accomplishing? In a perfect world where guns were never invented and we could foresee their invention I would be all for banning them (then again the gun is a major reason for the shift of the paradigm that you needed to kill all of the opposing army to defeat an enemy in war). But the fact of the matter is we have them, we have a lot of them, it simply isn't possible and will not accomplish anything to ban them.
Again it is illogical to care about gun related violence. Also on the basis of your correlative evidence try and tell me that the other major occurrences in these country's aren't responsible to the lack of guns in these country's. For example the UK has the second highest drug abuse record in the world with almost 2 drug offenses per person per capita. I know that this assertion has very little basis but it goes to show the connections you can draw with correlative evidence.
Another major thing is that every country measures it's crime rates differently, when the UN re releases this data it specifically tells the countries not to make claims based of it because it's more indicative of differences in how a country reports crimes. For example in most countries if you commit murder twice in one go you're only charged with the most violent of crimes. Some places charge crimes when you arrive at the police station, some when you're convicted, others after you're sentenced. For example new zealand reports all murders, thefts and rapes three times because each are three separate crimes.
Spindozzy you illustrated an interesting point. If .5% of the world population is dying from the flu (keep in mind the most common type of flu is also a swine flu, what's important is the marker, no this is not mexican flu) why do we care about .01% in America which has one of the highest gun fatality rates in the developed first world? So you're comparing a worldwide flu problem of .5% (500 in 100,000) to the worst example of first world gun deaths and attempting to make the point that the first world gun deaths (10 in 100,000 but realistically 4 in 100,000 including gang violence) are similar in degree or problem factor to flu? Wow.
elfdude on
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Anyway, like I said, Penn and Teller are douchenozzles and I don't even know what Teller's role is on the show except to put on stupid hats and make stupid faces now and then.
You're lucky your avatar is awesome, else I'd hate you to death.
But really, what episode did they run that made you hate them? Had to be the smoking one right? :P
I like the idea of the show and so far I have only seen one episode but I doubt I would disagree with much of any of it. I saw part of the religion one and that kind of ticked me off, but whatever, mainly Penn has just always been a douchnozzle. I saw the apocalypse one and Penn singing f-bombs was gratingly annoying.
Anyway, like I said, Penn and Teller are douchenozzles and I don't even know what Teller's role is on the show except to put on stupid hats and make stupid faces now and then.
You're lucky your avatar is awesome, else I'd hate you to death.
But really, what episode did they run that made you hate them? Had to be the smoking one right? :P
I like the idea of the show and so far I have only seen one episode but I doubt I would disagree with much of any of it. I saw part of the religion one and that kind of ticked me off, but whatever, mainly Penn has just always been a douchnozzle. I saw the apocalypse one and Penn singing f-bombs was gratingly annoying.
Ahh yeah. You should watch the Ghost Hunting one and/or the PETA episode. The water one was really good too.
I haven't read this thread since it changed to just a generic thing about the show, but I liked the first season way more than any of the others.
Now it seems like they're finding stuff to bitch about for the sake of bitching, as opposed to actually feeling any sort of outrage over the subject. Kinda like Lewis Black. They yell for the sake of yelling. It's fairly entertaining, but not nearly as good when you can tell their hearts aren't into it.
Also, I'm sure its been said, but the hour format was a lot better than the half-hour one. They don't seem to be making strong enough cases for their opinions or touching on the broader themes of the issue. Now it's all "And then there's THIS asshole..." *spend thirty seconds talking over his random opinion they disagree with* "Ha ha what a crazy motherfucker!"
Posts
Yeah, pretty much this.
I file this show in the same mental category as Mythbusters. It's docu-tainment, emphasis on the entertainment. It's often wrong, and sometimes when it's right, it's right for the wrong reasons.
Still pretty fun to watch, though, as long as you don't take it too seriously.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Here's the rub, though: there are two senses to the word "ban."
There's a "ban" as with movies, which isn't really a ban, just a willing agreement by theaters and retailers to check ID before selling an R-rated movie or a movie ticket to a minor. If somebody violates that agreement they might lose privileges with the MPAA but they're not breaking the law.
Then there's a "ban" as in 'we want to make it illegal to sell explicit content to minors.' That's what Jack wants to do... but you can't do that because of this little itty bitty thing called the First Amendment.
If the whole games industry got together with the ESRB and said "We're going to mutally agree not to sell M-rated games to minors," that's great. Lovely! Wonderful! I'm all about that.
When you start trying to use the authority of the law, then it becomes censorship, and I'm against that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But yeah. The movie system is entirely voluntary, is broken with some regularity, and society has notably failed to fall apart at the seams.
The first amendment doesn't prevent them from locking you up for selling porn to minors though does it? How couldn't they use the same justification for other explicit content that would contribute to the delinquency of a minor?
The porno 'decency' laws are unconstitutional in the first place and is government censorship which is absolutely retarded.
As with any philosophy a moderation of it use is the best bet. This applies to libertarian ideas, obviously you have to regulate power (by power I mean the ethreal kind) and it's ability to subjugate others or your freedom is just an illusion and the strongest are the only real free people. This disjunction with the purist libertarian idealism and libertarian pragmaticism is the difference between penn and teller and other libertarians. They understand it's not pragmatic to allow everything no matter what, but they're constitutional purists. The freedoms guarenteed in the constituion are what they lecture towards.
Further they dispell ideals that people have about the danger of X by comparing it to the accepted Y and realize that the danger of Y is greater than that of X therefore why isn't X legal? As far as video games go there is no danger. All sports pose more hazardous influences to children than video games, further sport stars often have some sort of survival of the fittest philosophy that puts them on the top and many teachers groom that ideal. Smoking is hazardous to your health but there's no evidence that second hand smoking causes any of the same problems (from a chemist point of view the diffusion of the smoke exhaled or drifting is almost instantaneous). This same theme is repeated by them over and over.
I don't know if anybody's ever been convicted of CDM for giving porn to a minor. Generally, CDM is reserved for cases where you help a minor break the law - if it's not against the law for a minor to have porn, then it's not CDM to give a minor porn. I might be wrong about that, though, considering how vague CDM laws are and how loose the courts play them.
In any case, I think such things are covered under the obscenity exemptions to the First Amendment. I think you would have a very hard time arguing that most M-rated video games like GTA are obscenity under the Miller Test.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That problem can be summed up simply as "you may not believe in society, but rest assured, society definitely believes in you." But Penn's problem goes beyond that as well - if you watch the Wal-Mart episode, there are several times that he actually outright evades the questions put to him by the people opposed to him. A good example of this is when Greenwald brings up the fact that Wal-Mart uses scheduling as a punative measure, and Penn responds with a completely nonsensical rant about how Greenwald's editor has a schedule. It sounds like he's responding on a high level, but if you actually look at it, he's actually outright dodging the question, ignoring Greenwald's point completely.
Libertarians only focus on those positive freedoms and almost completely ignore the negative freedoms. Unfortunately, in the real world, a lot of negative freedoms are mutually exclusive from the positive freedoms. The whole second-hand smoke is a great example. I have the negative freedom from being injured by someone blowing their toxic smoke my way. However, they ignore that and they focus on the positive freedom that they got has to smoke.
While I don't always agree with their argument, I at least respect that Penn comes out and says he is very bias and he's arguing his own view point.
that and I like naked people.
Which is both a cop-out and an attempt to avoid the actual issue of what happened there. The problem wasn't that he was wrong about secondhand smoke, it was that he got caught laundering the "research" of a known discredited hack of a scientist who made his career as being a stooge of Big Tobacco. There's a big difference.
I don't have a problem with bias. The problem is dishonesty and evasion.
Well, in all honesty, I would argue that this is a linguistic artifact of the multiple definitions of the word "freedom." Freedom from harm and freedom to exercise one's rights aren't necessarily equivalent.
That said, if we acknowledge that a fundamental purpose of government is to guarantee certain freedoms - freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to pursue a career, freedom to raise a family - then the most direct threat to those freedoms today come not from men wielding guns, but from men using money like a carrot and stick. There's no freedom of religion if all the housing in your community is owned by Mormons who will find a way to put your ass out on the street if you speak ill about Jesus. There's no freedom of speech if you have to worry that your employer is going to fire you for attending a political rally in your free time. Threat of homelessness, threat of starvation, threat of poverty just as chilling as the threat of arrest.
Libertarians don't acknowledge the power of money in any way more than lip service. The only power worth discussion in their worldview is the power of physical force, and the powers of the government as backed up by the threat of physical force. This is incredibly myopic in my opinion.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
WalMart doesn't practice that on a mass scale, WalMart practices it from manager to manager. The store policies can be completely different depending on where you go and the demand for workers. It's usually a bad policy to have a hostile work environment but even so walmart pays it's workers the best starting wage of any retail store. Almost all of the naysayer's claims about walmart are either practiced by most retail stores or retarded.
As for second hand smoke can someone link me to the actual numbers? In med school we are taught it's 1:100k without and 1:80k risk of death with and without it with which amounts to no statistical evidence of actual second hand smoke so it'd be neat if that was wrong.
Also for your pos freedoms vs negative freedoms I agree, but no you don't have the right to not be shot because being shot when guns are legal is far less likely to happen than being shot when guns aren't but the black market sells them. Violent crimes and murders don't decrease with the illegalization of guns and many criminals who have guns when ordinary civilians (and in some first world countries even basic law enforcement) can't carry guns are completely untouchable. The thing I would disagree with is how you sort out the positive freedoms and negative freedoms.
I hear gang lieutenants using that logic all the time. We don't encourage it, lots of employees, shit happens, blah blah blah.
By the same logic you just implicated every regimented organization which (hate to say it) is nearly every one of them. Internal affairs is always going to be one step behind the person who breaks the laws. The difference is walmark makes an active attempt to keep it to a minimum and bad managers don't last long. Further with over 70% of the management starting on floor jobs most managers are far more empathetic than with other companies which typically hire far hire percentage of out group management. You have to realize Walmart is THE LARGEST company in the world employing more people than many countries have population. Just like anything the larger the scale you do it on the more and more isolated instances of something going wrong will appear.
Walmart pays it's employees total around 100+ billion a year. Restricting something that large and that influential is asking over a million employees to find a better job and the fact of the matter is almost no jobs pay on average 10 bucks an hour. The national minimum wage is around 5.50 and the starting wage for walmart is around 10. Stop fucking complaining.
Umm I don't entirely know what you mean here.
I understand I don't have a right to be shot but I do have a right to life and surely that life is put more at risk by a culture where guns are everywhere and are actively used?
Isn't the gun deaths total of the UK (a country with little gun ownership) much lower as a proportion than the US? Criminals who have guns in this country are not untouchable, they get caught just as well as if every policeman had an assault rifle.
This, however, is a perfectly debatable assertion.
They have an insanely restrictive approach to guns, where a swat team will happily raid houses even just suspected of having guns, and this has resulted in next to no shootings. The question is if one is willing to put up with that level of possible invasiveness in return for that level of safety.
oh one hand they presented a valid reason that lie detectors are bullshit, given the quite low succes rate of them (althrough that is debatable, I read up on it and some research say they are right 90% of the time while other research says it's at 60% thus being only a little big higher than just guessing)
but the whole part with the cupple, I mean the guy was more than clearly lying, hell you could see it before he even went to the fraking test and he got what he deserved, so i don't know why the show tried to make the viewer feel sympathy for him
I was struggling with wording my argumnt TBH.
In areas where no guns are allowed especially ones where criminals can get them in black markets criminals are largely nonpunishable and nondeterable. No one with a gun is going to flip out about a shopkeep with a bat. A major reason that guns should be legalized is because they exist. By illegalizing them you simply take guns out of the hands of the non criminal and create an even larger black market for the already booming underground gun trade. When you have criminals with guns and civilians without bad things happen.
Further by making guns illegal you only decrease the chance of death by firearm by .1%. Which to science is statistically irrelevant. Of course politicians will tell you that you have 1000% more chance of death by firearm in the US than you do in UK which is true but all you're doing is changing the way you look at the numbers when you have such a small number to deal with any difference can be a huge percentage. A difference which is irrelevant because science says there's no way to say whether it's cultural, population density etc. Further you're trading a statistical irrelevant number (which there's no way to say if you were to make it illegal if it would actually go the way of the the UK) for another statistically irrelevant number of people victimized by violent crimes.
Making an argument against guns makes no logical sense considering how low on the totem pole they are. Further finding a statistic of their deaths that excludes suicide (about 60% of all gun related fatalities are suicide) and police shootings/defensive killing (about 15% more) is nearly impossible. It's important to note that in a country with some 330,000,000 people that means around ~7-8k die a year from criminal activity involving guns most of which is related to intercity gang vs gang violence.
Asian/African/South American statistics are not applicable to America either because of huge paradigm shifts on what is acceptable or not. Japan is a police state where every crime is a major one and that's how they keep their people in control. Mexico's military is mobilized just to keep the country from devolving into anarchy. Africans regularly kill each other for food.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=10976538#post10976538
Some facts from this website:
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm
and an article from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6960431.stm
Some select facts from this site:
In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States - over 80 deaths every day
In a table of selected developed countries 3.98 people died per 100,000 of the population while the next closest was Italy with 0.51 per 100,000. Only in Switzerland were gun related suicides the only comparable statistic to American gun ownership statistics (this is a country with between 1.2-3 million guns and a population of 7.7million people)
I'm not saying that guns kill people directly, i'm not even saying americans are lunatics but I'm saying that you seem to have a readiness to reach to a gun and a consequent disregard for the consequences of guns. Other countries seem able to balance dangerous weapons and social control but something seems to be going wrong in America.
tldr version: I disagree with your assertion that countries with lack of guns are inhernetly more dangerous place or that a gun is necesary to protect you from crime.
No idea what statistically significant means huh? It means that the small number is TOO (gun deaths) small to be accurately compared to the big number (population). 10 in 100,000 is statistically insignificant to 1 in 100,000. The chance of dying from a gun death is .0001 or .00001 and the difference between those two numbers is .1. But if you keep it in the big number method you can make the assertion that you have 1000% more chance to die in the US than the UK from guns, which is a half truth but indicates more of a political agenda than a real number. Both numbers are unreliable in comparison to the context they're taken from. Also 26k gun deaths takes into account ALL deaths that guns are involved in. 60% of that is SUICIDE rates. The USA as of 2008 has a 3.5 deaths due to homicide, 6 deaths related to suicide and .5 deaths related to other per 100,000. Which is a total of 10 per 100,000. Of those 3.5 homicide rates around 70% are gang related violence. That means if we take away our guns our actual gun crime rate would drop to about 1 per 100,000 which it is at anyways because suicides will always suicide regardless of getting rid of guns and gang violence before the advent of reliable hand guns involved very bloody en masse knife fights which were far more deadly.
Again I did point those statistics out which the numbers your guy provides are also based off of so maybe looking at what I said and what he said might be important huh?
Also all I can say from reading his post is it's a good thing there wasn't a statistician in that thread who could show him why every number he quoted was as good as bunk.
1 in 100,000 and 10 in 100,000 is tenfold greater, which is not a 0.1% difference. The percentage for the former is 0.001% and the latter 0.01% which is a difference of 0.009% whether or not this is statistically significant depends on the base rates and standard deviations of the numbers involved. There's no magic number which which things cross the threshold of being statistically significant, or not. Given the base rate in this case in this case is small, the standard deviation is likewise small, and the difference IS statistically significant. The fact that the difference in scale is 10 or 1000% this is not insignificant.
I like how your post assumes that actuaries are gibbering retards who can't actually determine statistical signfiicance without your help.
I see this argument a lot, but given that none of the first world nations who've banned civilian firearms seem to suffer from skyrocketing murder, robbery or generic bad things rates, i'm partial to the opinion that the argument is full of crap.
For example, I judge that those numbers are so small as to not mean bunk. The difference is so small that it's very weasely to claim it means anything. It's like a highly technical morality argument that makes you go o_O even though all the logic is correct. It's technically significant but its meaningless from a human standpoint.
In psychology there are specific, rather abritrary, values of difference called statistically significant which is probably what elfdude is trying to say.
But he's forgotten the most important point: that the words "statistically different" there is a human judgement, not a pure numbers thing.
28,000 people is an awful lot of people bigger than most moderately sized towns. Around 57 people in the UK died from gun crime last year, thats still 57 too many. The US population is only 6 times larger than the UK's at best estimate yet British people are not less likely to punch you or beat you up than anyone else in the world. We still have violent crime. Its not that you are more likely to be violent just that the type of violence you perpetrate is so much more devestating.
Adding guns to a situation adds uncertaintity to it. Unless you've shot someone before you can never appreciate the disproportionate carnage such a small item can cause. Americans don't seem able to seperate what happens when you point a gun at someone and the actual consequences of doing so. Neither do other people when they stab them or punch someone but the results of a gunshot are surely much harder to undo?
Also, so what if most of the gun grime is gang based? They're still people, just because they are in gangs and in poverty they shouldn't count in the statistics.
So if somebody says something is statistically significant, that's not enough. They can't just end it there. They then need to justify why this arbitrary numbers difference is meaningful.
Most important thing to remember about statistics right there.
Anyway, like I said, Penn and Teller are douchenozzles and I don't even know what Teller's role is on the show except to put on stupid hats and make stupid faces now and then.
You're lucky your avatar is awesome, else I'd hate you to death.
.1% difference was a typo i corrected it within a few minutes of posting but not fast enough it seems. Also again why it's not statistically significant is because the small number (gundeaths) is being related to a overtly large number (population). In modern science this relationship is rejected as evidence for a specific reason. False positives, skewed results, Familywise error rate, False Discovery rate, TYPE I, TYPE II errors all could easily produce the difference in data. Since The per capita rate of gun murder in the US is .01% and the per capita gun murder rate of england is .001% neither is scientifically applicable data. As such you can make spurious claims related to the data and make claims as to why it is but it is impossible to prove that it's gun control that is the contributor to this. While I don't have any doubt that gun control at least plays a major role in it we cannot guarantee or even establish that it will have any effect on America. Again, when eliminating suicide our number drops to about 4 in 100,000 which, eliminate the .5 that are deaths related to cops and that's 3.5 then eliminate another 70% that's related to gang violence and that means that the US's per capita death by firearm rate is around .7 in 100,000 which is more applicable to the world. This .7-.5 will never go away and it's dumb to expect suicides to go away without the aide of a gun for obvious reasons as well as police inspired fatalities, it's also dumb to expect gang related violence to go down either. That means in actuality you're taking care of around .2 max in 100,000 homicides (if any). For comparison there's around 153 deaths per 100,000 due to cancer. 300 in 100,000 due to heart disease, 10 per 100,000 because of diabetus, 20 in 100,000 due to accidental chance.
To put it in perspective the murder rate in the UK is ~1 in 100,000 the murder rate in the US is ~4 in 100,000 (look it's much lower than the number of gun deaths) 3.5 of that number is from guns (half of the UK's is from guns) but ~3 of that number is gang related violence which is doubtful to disappear. Meaning by getting rid of guns you're saving no innocents from murder and you're creating a black market economy and your setting a precedents that the bill of rights can be rewritten and to stop that minority of murders you're taking away guns from the millions of owners in America.
Tell me what you're actually accomplishing? In a perfect world where guns were never invented and we could foresee their invention I would be all for banning them (then again the gun is a major reason for the shift of the paradigm that you needed to kill all of the opposing army to defeat an enemy in war). But the fact of the matter is we have them, we have a lot of them, it simply isn't possible and will not accomplish anything to ban them.
Again it is illogical to care about gun related violence. Also on the basis of your correlative evidence try and tell me that the other major occurrences in these country's aren't responsible to the lack of guns in these country's. For example the UK has the second highest drug abuse record in the world with almost 2 drug offenses per person per capita. I know that this assertion has very little basis but it goes to show the connections you can draw with correlative evidence.
Another major thing is that every country measures it's crime rates differently, when the UN re releases this data it specifically tells the countries not to make claims based of it because it's more indicative of differences in how a country reports crimes. For example in most countries if you commit murder twice in one go you're only charged with the most violent of crimes. Some places charge crimes when you arrive at the police station, some when you're convicted, others after you're sentenced. For example new zealand reports all murders, thefts and rapes three times because each are three separate crimes.
Spindozzy you illustrated an interesting point. If .5% of the world population is dying from the flu (keep in mind the most common type of flu is also a swine flu, what's important is the marker, no this is not mexican flu) why do we care about .01% in America which has one of the highest gun fatality rates in the developed first world? So you're comparing a worldwide flu problem of .5% (500 in 100,000) to the worst example of first world gun deaths and attempting to make the point that the first world gun deaths (10 in 100,000 but realistically 4 in 100,000 including gang violence) are similar in degree or problem factor to flu? Wow.
Ahh yeah. You should watch the Ghost Hunting one and/or the PETA episode. The water one was really good too.
Now it seems like they're finding stuff to bitch about for the sake of bitching, as opposed to actually feeling any sort of outrage over the subject. Kinda like Lewis Black. They yell for the sake of yelling. It's fairly entertaining, but not nearly as good when you can tell their hearts aren't into it.
Also, I'm sure its been said, but the hour format was a lot better than the half-hour one. They don't seem to be making strong enough cases for their opinions or touching on the broader themes of the issue. Now it's all "And then there's THIS asshole..." *spend thirty seconds talking over his random opinion they disagree with* "Ha ha what a crazy motherfucker!"