A Lot More Statistics!

I was on Twitter/X for over a year, and I have since deactivated my account, mostly because Twitter does not promote the kind of dialogue I want to have: reasoned well, minimal fallacies, correctly-done statistics, etc. On that last note, one of the things I did on Twitter was “paper bashing”, where you take a typical scientific experimental study, examine the statistics in it, find out they are terrible, and finally conclude that the paper says nothing or very little. For certain sub-populations of the scientific establishment such as medical papers, the failure rate is likely over 50%.

This is a fun activity. I bashed all 90 papers on the CDC’s Mask Science web site, which, I note with some amusement, was taken down some time between 9/21/2023 and 9/24/2023 (hence the Wayback Machine link). Of those 90 papers, fully 88 of them had experimental designs far too weak to support their grandiose conclusions, and the other 2 had conclusions far too weak to support the CDC’s use of them! Every single paper published by MMWR (the CDC’s own paper-publishing machine) was uniformly terrible – one paper even had a sample size of 1.

So there’s a dearth of good statistics being done nowadays. For masks, it seems likely to me that there was significant pressure from political control freaks (looking mostly at you, Democrats!) to have “The Science” come out in favor of the face diapers. But all this did was undermine any sliver of faith remaining in the scientific establishment. Scientists now look like complete morons, because they are allowing politics to subvert statistics and good science. Fixing that is a worldview issue, and certainly isn’t going to be solved by teaching more statistics. (By the way, the phrase “settled science” is a complete, utter oxymoron.)

However, there is plenty of statistical incompetence to go around, even for people less politically motivated. What to do? Well, I think the following should be done post-haste:

1. Require a basic statistics course for ALL undergraduate degrees, both associate’s and bachelor’s. Rationale: statistics courses are to inductive fallacies what logic courses are to deductive fallacies: they arm the student against said fallacies. And boy do we need a lot more of that! For that matter, basic logic, especially the ubiquitous informal fallacies, should be required also.
2. Require a LOT more statistics for literally any science major – biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Better throw in all the soft sciences as well: sociology and psychology. The goal is to get to Analysis and Design of Experiments, typically a statistics major senior-level course. This would enable the competent scientist to design, run, collect data from, and analyze their own experiments, as well as read experimental research papers with ease. Statistics is at the heart of experimental science; so without statistics, science majors flounder. This would, in effect, require all science majors to take Calculus I, II, and III, Linear Algebra, Mathematical Statistics (one year), Linear Regression, and finally Analysis and Design of Experiments. (Most scientists should consider taking Differential Equations as well.)

Left and Right: Germany vs. the US

I’ve seen this ambiguity in other writers, and it’s bothered me for some time, but seeing it yet again in the otherwise very nice book The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, I simply have to say something about it. (Incidentally, Evans is merely being a bit sloppy with the terms “right” and “left” – not defining them anywhere, so far as I can see. But others have done much more.)

What I have to say is this: the right/left political continuum in Germany during the early twentieth century bears almost no resemblance to the right/left political continuum in the United States from, say, the 1960s on.

Why is that? Because the concept of conservatism as Burke conceived of it is essentially unknown outside the Anglosphere (UK, Canada, US, Australia, and New Zealand). In the US right now, it is conservatives who generally make up “the right”. But in no way could anyone reasonably call “the right” of early-twentieth-century Germany conservative in the Burkean sense.

Why is this important? Because in the US, at least, liberals and especially progressives seem to delight in calling conservatives Nazis, apparently since the Nazis appealed to the German right, and conservatives are the US right. I can think of no other reason that liberals and progressives do this.

It’s fairly trivial to refute the charge of Nazism leveled against conservatives. The Nazis were socialists (the word “socialist” is part of the acronym “Nazi”). Conservatives oppose socialism on pretty much every level: fundamental assumptions, reasoning methods, and solutions. Nazism is actually, in modern US political terms, quite a leftist political ideology. I can think of few, if any, things the Nazis stood for that conservatives would not vigorously oppose. The main pillar of Nazism, as with all leftist (used in the modern US sense) ideologies, is the idea of statism: the state is our savior, and we can legislate our way, if we are clever enough, to a brighter future. Conservatives view this as the arrogant nonsense it is.

What is Beautiful Music?

Is there an objective standard for beauty in music? If so, what is it? How can you tell if a piece of music is beautiful or not? We propose, in this article, to lay out a number of criteria whereby you can decide if a piece of music is objectively beautiful. The goal is to produce a method for shaping your taste. Good taste is when your likes and dislikes correspond to beauty or the lack, respectively. My examples will be largely from western classical music, because that is what I know best, but I think the general principles are much larger.

First of all, we must decide on the definition of the word “beautiful.” We will take the medieval notion: a piece of music is beautiful if it has form, harmony, and complexity. Each of these three aspects will have criteria that fall under it, though several criteria might well straddle the boundaries between these aspects.

Second of all, we must decide on whether a particular performance of a piece of music is beautiful. Here, we say that if the performers perform a beautiful piece of music with close alignment to the original purpose of the piece, then it is a beautiful performance. Aspects of a beautiful performance include technique and soul.

Beautiful Music: Form

Underneath the aspect of form, we will consider that a beautiful piece of music must have overall (or global) shape and local shape. That is, there must be shape on multiple scales.

Beautiful Music: Form: Overall Shape

By overall, or global, shape, we mean that there must be organization to the piece as a whole. A beautiful piece of music cannot be aimless and meandering. As J. S. Bach wrote, “The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.” So there must be some purpose to a piece of music, and the overall shape should be suited to that purpose. This also touches on the aspect of harmony.

A composer always has some aim in mind when writing music; sometimes the composer skillfully writes the overall shape to achieve that aim, but other times the composer, through incompetence, fails to write to achieve that aim. An example of skillful overall shape is Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. The whole symphony has a definite shape, and you see the original motif of three short notes and a long repeated in every single movement. This gives a unification to the entire symphony – the four movements are definitely strongly related to one another. An example of the lack of overall shape can be seen in John Cage’s work of seeming randomness in 4:33. The pianist sits down at the piano, sets a timer for 4:33, waits until the alarm goes off, and then gets up. The idea, presumably, is for the audience to listen to the ambient sounds. But this piece of “music” has no pre-determined overall shape, and therefore cannot be considered beautiful.

Beautiful Music: Form: Local Shape

By local shape, we mean that shorter and longer phrases have a purposeful organization and design that fits well within the overall shape. This may look quite different for sung music versus instrumental music. In instrumental music, there does not need to be a consideration that the music fit the words and make important words line up with important musical ideas. Of this we will write more in the harmony section.

An example of music with good local shape is Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, Second Movement. The Largo has the famous English Horn solo, with a lovely local shape. It starts lower, rises, and then falls again. This is quite a common local shape, but it is difficult to exhaust its possibilities.

Examples of music with poor local shape are easily found in mnemonic device songs – songs written to help children remember passages of text. As the text in such cases is rarely written as a poem, the resulting tunes tend to be very meandering and forgettable, with little local shape. The pitches seem random, rather than having a destination in mind. Some might object that medieval chant is the same; the difference between medieval chant and typically mnemonic device songs is that the chant is not written in a time signature, whereas the mnemonic devices songs are. Having a regular time signature sets up an expectation of purpose and drive and direction, whereas the lack of a time signature sets up a quite different expectation of timelessness – which is exactly what chant is trying to do.

Beautiful Music: Harmony

By harmony, we mean more than just the strict musical definition of harmony, as in multiple pitches in a beautiful chord. We mean a “fitting together” of all the aspects of a piece of music in a way that suits the purpose or aim of the music. This certainly includes musical harmony in the narrow sense, but it also includes agreement of words and tune for songs, and sensible orchestration, and many other aspects.

Harmony touches as well on worldview, something that many people do not consider. For example, the works of Stockhausen and Berg are ugly and have little harmony. Why? Because the composers were modernists and secularists. They saw that there is brokenness in the world, but had no concept of redemption. The result is that in their musical harmony, there is only dissonance and no consonance (resolution). On the other end of the spectrum is the works of Johann Strauss, Jr., composer of The Beautiful Blue Danube, Emperor’s Waltz, etc. His worldview appeared to have no room for brokenness, and hence his work has only consonance but no dissonance. A more biblical, and therefore accurate, worldview will have both dissonance and consonance, such as in the works of Bach, Dvorak, Haydn, and
Mendelssohn, among others.

Here are the various aspects of harmony that we will consider: musical harmony, rhythm, orchestration, mood, word/music agreement, and form.

Beautiful Music: Harmony: Musical Harmony

By musical harmony, we mean what happens when multiple different pitches occur at the same time so that the listener hears them at the same time. Harmony can be dissonant or consonant. Dissonant harmonies sound harsh on the ear, and as if the music should go on to something else. They produce tension. Consonant harmonies sound like they are ending something, and as if the piece could stop there, or at least pause.

As we mentioned before, the composer’s worldview will play into the harmonies used. If the worldview is biblical and hence realistic to the fallen world around us, it will include dissonance, unlike the works of Johann Strauss, Jr. But a biblical worldview should also produce consonance, as we have redemption in Jesus Christ. Secular worldviews produce ugly music, like Stockhausen and Berg, who have no consonance and therefore no resolution. The tension and resolve of dissonance and consonance, respectively, is absolutely vital to beautiful music. In choral works, for example, a most beautiful effect is when the choir emphasizes a dissonance, and falls off it gently to a consonance.

A competent composer, having a worldview as everyone does, will write music in accordance with that worldview. The biblical worldview produces the most beautiful music, as it has tension and resolve.

There are many, many examples of competent composers writing with tension and resolve; perhaps the greatest is Bach, but Dvorak, Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and many others illustrate the point.

Beautiful Music: Harmony: Rhythm

Rhythm is concerned with when the various pitches or sounds of a piece of music
occur in time. Rhythm says something important about what the composer is trying to say. If the piece has fast rhythms, the composer might be trying to hurry the listener along. Or if slow rhythms, the composer might be trying to achieve an effect of timelessness. This last effect is particularly strong if there is no regular time signature. The question to ask is this: given what the composer is trying to say, does the rhythm support that message, or does it detract from it? If the message is about mourning a tragic death, then fast rhythms would detract from the message. Conversely, if the message is about a race, then slow rhythms would detract from the message.

One example of a humorous, but effective, use of rhythm to support a message is in Saint-Seans’ Carnival of the Animals, where he slows the Can-Can down to illustrate slow-moving turtles.

Beautiful Music: Harmony: Orchestration

By orchestration, we mean the instrumentation, or the instruments used in a piece of music. Instruments all have a range of expression, and taking an instrument outside of its normal range of expression can either be highly effective, or disastrous. As an example, a bouncy tune in a major key played on the bassoon would be utterly incapable of conveying a serious tone. It will sound humorous or sardonic. Conversely, a slow melody in the double-basses will not convey the impression of being light-at-heart. An instrument can often play more than one timbre, which is important to consider as well. A trombone can play in a “lordly” tone, or a “brassy” tone, and the effect is quite different.

The question is whether the instruments used support the message the composer is trying to say. Some examples of this working well are in The Planets by Gustav Holst – some of the most brilliant orchestration ever written. Conversely, playing the Hallelujah Chorus on a Jew’s Harp sets the instrumentation at odds with the message.

It is also a maxim that instruments with more range of expression, such as the strings, voice, piano, and organ, should generally play more of the time than instruments with a narrower range of expression like drums and other percussion. Even woodwinds and brass do not have the range of expression that strings do. Perhaps the most limited instrument of all, the gong, should only be hit once in any piece, whereas strings can play for an entire piece without being tiresome. Modern pop music fails at this sense of proportion, tending to make the drums play constantly, for example. We also point out that the exact proportion does vary a bit depending on the instrumentation: an orchestra will have a different balance than a concert band, which will have a different balance from a Highland pipes and drums band.

Beautiful Music: Harmony: Agreement of Words and Music

For sung pieces of music, there is an additional dimension to consider: the words. Words mean things and produce a certain effect. A skillful composer can enhance that effect greatly with music that matches the words well, or an inept composer can write music that quite counters the message of the words.

One aspect of music-word agreement is syllable emphasis: do more important syllables land on more important notes? This is simultaneously the single most important aspect of music-word agreement, as well as the most commonly violated aspect of music-word agreement in mediocre songs. As most music written today is in a time signature, it is a maxim that metered (and I would add rhymed) poetry will almost always fit such music better than anything else. The presence of meter in the lyrics allows the composer to match the repetitions of the music with repetitions in the strong syllables. The presence of rhyme allows a higher-level repetition, as well, that is usually more satisfactory than otherwise. Here, again, mnemonic device songs often fail spectacularly, because neither the composers nor the lyricists ever troubled to take the text-to-remember and form it into rhymed and metered poetry.

This aspect has another scale, however: the phrase or even line. A sentence or longer phrase will have some particularly important word the author would want emphasized. Did the composer shape the phrase or line so that that word corresponded with the high point of the phrase?

Another aspect of music-word agreement is mood (more on that in section Mood). Do you have sorrowful words? Then the music should reflect that, and not be bright and chipper. Or are your words about the joy in the resurrection of Christ? Then a funeral dirge (except possibly at the beginning, and overtaken by something else) would be completely inappropriate. This also gets into performance: are the performers playing what is on the page? What we are getting at here is the medium versus the message, as Marshall McLuhan would put it. Are the message and the medium pointing in the same direction? Then you have a more skillful composer with a better result. Or are the message and the medium at odds? Then you have a more inept composer with a mediocre result.

Beautiful Music: Harmony: Mood

As the sum of the previous points, given the musical harmonies, rhythms, possibly words, and orchestrations of a piece, the result will be a certain mood that the music produces in the listener. The question is, does the mood produced match what the composer intended? The rule here is, as with the previous points, that being intentional and deliberate, as well as skillful, is better than otherwise. As most composers play their own music back to themselves continually while composing it, this point is usually a given with any experienced composer. After all, music moves the emotions, and all serious composers understand this instinctually.

Beautiful Music: Complexity

In today’s world of MacMusic, this aspect will be debated. Does a piece of music have to have complexity to be beautiful? We do not have the time or inclination to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that an entire book has been written on this subject: All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, by Ken Myers. The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” To me, the most important aspect of Myers’s argument comes from Philippians 4:8, where it would be absurd for the apostle Paul to expect his readers to think about things (in Greek, logizesthe, which means deep, intentional thinking – mulling over) that are not worth thinking about. And it is precisely the more complex things that are worth thinking about, rather than the simple.

We will also say simply that if a composer has all of the above in mind when writing – and all the greatest composers had all that in mind and much more – then complexity will be there automatically.

Also, going back to Myers and his distinctions among folk culture, high culture, and popular culture: is it the folk and high cultures that will satisfy this criterion much more often than the popular culture.

Beautiful Performance: Technique

We now move on to the performance. What makes a beautiful performance? The first aspect to consider is technique. Is the performer playing or singing well? Good technique is extremely straight-forward to evaluate for anyone skilled at an instrument: good pianists know when someone else is a good pianist. Good singers know when someone is singing well. We point this out to say that this is an objective thing. Good pianists, for example, appear relaxed and comfortable. They can play trills evenly, fast parallel thirds, sixths, or octaves. They can play at exactly the dynamic level they want, with the articulation desired. Good violinists can play exactly on pitch, with good tone, without sounding “scratchy.” Good singers can project their voice well without a microphone, articulate consonants precisely, stay with their accompaniment on time, do not sound strained at the high end of their range, etc.

The real question is: if you are not a skilled performer, how could you tell if a particular performer is skilled or not? Probably the best criterion is whether the performer makes it look easy. If the performer makes it look easy, then either the performer is quite good, or the piece is simple. The old saying is that the perfection of art is to conceal it. This is especially true in musical performance, because the true goal of the performer is to make the music come alive for the listener, not to draw attention to the performer.

Beautiful Performance: Soul

This last point is perhaps the most important of any we have made so far. Whether a particular performance has “soul” is not easy to define, though it is certainly something truly great performers know instinctively. Perhaps one way to say it would be, “Does this performance move the listener, like it obviously has the performer?” Great rhetoric here dictates that the performer knows the music is beautiful on its own, and simply wants to convey that beauty, as much as possible, to the listener. The performer is already moved by the music, and seeks to move the listener. When that happens, there is “soul” in the music. The greatest music moves the listener in a good direction: towards God. This is why I believe Bach to be the greatest composer of all time. He consistently has soul in his music, and always moves the listener towards God.

You will know if music moves you or not, so while this last point is important and unfortunately somewhat vague in one sense, it will be clear to the listener if there is soul in the music.

Soul is the culmination of all the previous points. Truly great art has all the characteristics above, including soul: it moves the listener towards God.

Taste

You now have (mostly) objective criteria to decide if a piece of music is beautiful or not. The rest is up to you: will you listen to beautiful music and allow yourself to be shaped by it? Or will you be content to listen to mediocre music which will leave you where you are?

The point here is not to become a better person than your neighbor; all such comparisons are dangerous. The point is to become a better person, period. Are you becoming more like Christ? Thinking about beautiful music is one way to obey Paul in Philippians 4:8, and it is my hope that this short monograph will help on that path.

“To Be” in Passive Voice

English, like most languages, does not have a passive voice for the verb “to be”. While there clearly isn’t much call for such a construction, how do we express the truth that God is continually causing the universe to continue to exist? Every moment I am alive, every moment I exist, is there because God actively wills it to be so.

I am being ammed.

Response to David French

David French recently wrote this article, which a fellow member of my church pointed out to me. I have now read it, and I have to admit being rather dismayed at its contents. It has what I would regard as numerous errors, mis-characterizations, and fallacies in it. I found it singularly unhelpful. Here’s a list:

1. He writes, “What I did not think, at any point, was that I was reading an idea fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity.” That is a large portion of what I have been laboring to show in some of my posts here. CRT has fundamental assumptions very much at odds with Christianity (the nature of truth and revelation, materialism vs. supernaturalism, postmodern anti-meta-narrative versus the Bible as meta-narrative, and many others). CRT distances itself from logic, which, as we have seen, we get from the Bible. CRT arrives at conclusions at odds with Christianity, including Kendi’s idea of discrimination to reduce disparities. CRT is anti-biblical, does not gain us any insight into racism that the Bible does not already give us, and therefore, we believe, is to be rejected. As Voddie Baucham would say, “It is not a helpful framework for understanding racism.” 

2. French is slightly off when he says that CRT is one aspect of critical theory. CRT inherits more from Critical Legal Studies than it does from Critical Theory. This may be nit-picking, as Critical Legal Studies does come from Critical Theory. 

3. French writes, ” … and there are ways in which CRT’s historical and legal analyses can help us better understand our nation and our culture.” I deny that. I believe CRT distorts history and law in its analyses. How is that helpful? The 1619 Project is a case in point: heavily promoted by CRT advocates, the 1619 Project, riddled with errors, seeks to do revisionist history. I don’t see that as helpful. What is helpful is to see history as it is, to see slavery as the horror it really was, to see Reconstruction as the helpless aggravation that it was, etc. 

4. Crenshaw’s article, which is certainly one of the seminal papers in CRT – it’s where we get Intersectionality – starts from the point of view of feminism, which I think also has many points at odds with Christianity. I am a firm complementarian myself, because I believe that is the biblical notion of manliness and femininity. I’m guessing French does not see the flaws in feminism? Her article seems rather circular (either that, or “proof by repeated assertion”) to me – simply assuming that her idea of intersectionality is the solution to the problem, but not providing any hard evidence for that claim. One paragraph in Crenshaw’s article appears to commit the argument ad ignorantium fallacy (arguing from ignorance):

“The court’s rulings on Moore’s sex and race claim left her with such a small statistical sample that even if she had proved that there were qualified Black women, she could not have shown discrimination under a disparate impact theory. Moore illustrates yet another way that antidiscrimination doctrine essentially erases Black women’s distinct experiences and, as a result, deems their discrimination complaints groundless.” – p. 146.

Granted that the lack of a sufficient sample size is frustrating, how can she extrapolate from lack of sample size to discrimination? She appears to reason like this: the lack of sample size is itself evidence of discrimination. It’s either arguing from ignorance, or it’s circular. I won’t take the time to critique Crenshaw’s entire article here. Doubtless that has been done adequately elsewhere, given its importance.

5. French’s comments about Resolution 9 are apparently not informed by Voddie Baucham’s extensive critique of it. It’s hard to read Baucham’s account of the history of Resolution 9 (confirmed by others) without coming to the conclusion that there was significant funny business going on: what the committee submitted got changed to mean almost the opposite. This is all in Baucham’s book Fault Lines. I wouldn’t call Resolution 9 “common sense”. 

6. French isn’t the only person to claim that Rufo and other conservatives have “redefined” CRT. Joy Reid of MSNBC once interviewed Rufo and accused him of coming up with Christopher Rufo Theory – a very clever, but ultimately thin attack. I do not agree that Rufo and other conservatives have fundamentally mis-characterized CRT. When I read Rufo, and I compare with Kendi and DiAngelo, it does not appear to me that Rufo is off-base in his descriptions. Perhaps it’s extreme of Rufo to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” but there’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever that a very significant portion of our current cultural insanity does, indeed, come from CRT. 

7. I disagree with French’s assessment of the TN bill. Reading the relevant portions is like reading DiAngelo, and parts of Kendi as well. Perhaps French is saying that Kendi and DiAngelo are not “worth their salt”? 

8. I do not agree with French’s characterization of a “closed mind”. I think it was Chesterton or some such who said, “An open mind is a fine thing, but it is meant to close on the truth.” Open minds are not automatically better ones if they are open to every sway of doctrine. A mind should be trying continually to conform more and more to the Bible. Once a mind closes on a truth such as, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God, fully God and fully man”, that mind should not be open to opposing doctrines in the sense of being willing to believe them. We must always be open to what the Bible and biblically-based logic say, and humbly recognize how sin clouds our judgment. A closed mind can be a wonderful thing if it is closed on the truth (not closed from the truth, of course!) Moreover, it is not in the least arrogant to close on the truth, despite what the postmoderns would – and do – say. Finally, it is possible for an individual to delve into a topic like CRT, find out enough of what it is, reject it, and move on with life and ignore CRT from then on with no ill effect. It is not everyone’s calling to fight every heresy, contra what the CRT folks – especially Kendi – say. 

9. The paragraph right before “One more thing…” beginning with “This is the exact wrong time … ” near the end reaches entirely erroneous conclusions, to my mind. Ecclesiastes says “There is nothing new under the sun.” CRT isn’t really new, it’s a rehashing of old ideas. Correct theology is also nearly always old, not new. As my brother Lane, an OPC pastor in Illinois likes to say, “When you do theology, you have to go deep, not broad. Broad is the danger zone of heresy.” You have to stay inside the bounds of the old creeds that so accurately reflect what the Bible says. There’s plenty of room to go deep! The brightest minds ever to have lived (thinking here of John Owens, for example) spent their entire lives studying the Bible, and never even began to scratch its surface, really. Sometimes the accusation of “CRT” is spot-on. I think that what we need is mostly for the so-called “new ideas” to show themselves a failure so that we can get back to the business of preserving and implementing the old ideas that are good. Sure there can be good new ideas: no conservative I have ever read is opposed to progress. But we conservatives always ask the question: progress from what to what? It’s just what Caspian said in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “I have seen them both in an egg. We call it ‘going bad’ in Narnia.” (Read what Gumpas says just before that for context.) This, of course, assumes that we have a measuring stick to say “That’s good, and this is bad.” In fact, there are three questions that Thomas Sowell has taught us to ask: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have? Most progressive ideas fail utterly at one or more of these. 

Is there anything I can agree with French on? Well, I can certainly agree that Christians in general shouldn’t shy away from difficult debates, whether that’s concerning race and justice or anything else. As I’ve already said, I don’t think it’s necessarily every Christian’s calling to engage in such debates, but those who are called to such things should go for it. French appears to approve of the general modus operandi of Christian writers such as Shenvi, as well as conservative writers such as McWhorter. I certainly have good value for those writers. And I certainly agree that the extreme manifestations of CRT clash with Christianity; though, as above, I would also argue that mainline CRT also clashes with Christianity. 

A New Sport: Paper Bashing

It’s fun: you take an average “scientific” paper, find its statistical flaws, and hence show that the paper says virtually nothing. I’ll start:

The paper “Associations of BNT162b2 vaccination with SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospital admission and death with covid-19 in nursing homes and healthcare workers in Catalonia: prospective cohort study” has the following issue:

The authors appear to be using propensity scoring (indicated by the phrase “standardized mean difference”) to control for confounders. This popular but controversial process requires a fundamental assumption of ignorability which is routinely simply assumed. Here is Judea Pearl, one of the founders of the New Causal Revolution, on propensity scoring:

Subsequent empirical studies, however, have taken a more critical view of propensity score, noting with disappointment that a substantial bias is sometimes measured when careful comparisons are made to results of clinical studies (Smith and Todd 2005; Luellen et al. 2005; Peikes et al. 2008). – Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2nd Ed., by Judea Pearl, p. 350. 

This casts doubt on the paper’s statistical methodology: to what extent could propensity scoring be biasing their results? Conditioning or adjusting for every possible confounder has been shown to be incorrect. It matters greatly how the variables influence each other, and which variables influence each other, as to whether you should condition on a particular variable. Indeed, one of the primary results of the New Causal Revolution is a correct definition of confounder: a confounder is a variable that sets up a backdoor path. The method used by the paper is not going to uncover that.

Here’s another paper: “Effect of Vaccination on Transmission of SARS-CoV-2”. In this paper, there was no discussion at all about how to determine which variables to adjust for: they simply adjusted for a whole raft of variables; this is a considerably worse approach than the BMJ paper above. Confounders are not equivalent to correlates. If you adjust for a mediator variable, for example, you will (usually) get the wrong answer.

Gun Control: Its Stupidity and Untruths

Just saw this news item from Townhall, and I have to say that the misunderstandings under which David Hogg are laboring are legion.

First of all, he claims that “The filibuster is causing ‘so many people to die every year.'” That’s a confusion on so many levels. The crazy, whacked-out genocidal maniacs are causing people to die every year, not the filibuster. In the article, Hogg is quoted as saying:

“While it is important to address how somebody like the shooter at my high school was able to get an AR-15, we need to address why the racism that drove him to pick up that gun, the anti-Semitism, the intolerance, the xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance that cause people to want to pick up a gun in the first place, and that’s why we’re urging the Biden administration to create a national directorate of gun violence prevention with no Senate confirmation necessary that could provide a holistic approach and inform the president on how to address this emergency in the United States.” 

Hogg fails to mention the really critical piece: what we actually need to address is why his high school is (probably, since it’s a public school) a gun-free zone, and why teachers don’t carry pistols.

The fact is that it is literally impossible to prevent people from getting most any firearm they want (maybe machine guns are a tad harder, but I imagine there are ways to get them, too), whether legal or illegal. Anyone bent on human destruction of that magnitude isn’t going to balk at some silly gun control laws. But what the mass murderers want is body count. So they’re going to go somewhere they can get it: gun-free zones and easy targets. Have you ever heard of a mass murderer targeting a police station? Or a gun range? I seriously doubt that would ever happen, and for the same reason that violent criminals look for easy targets.

The best way to prevent school violence is to arm the teachers. Some people, perhaps, might not want to pack, so don’t make it a requirement. But definitely make it encouraged!

So why the emphasis on gun control? Well, as always, there are at least two explanations. One is that gun control activists really are as naive as they sound – they really think that gun control laws are going to help with gun violence. The data suggests otherwise. All you have to do is look at Switzerland, a land that until recently required gun ownership of all citizens, and look at its absolutely tiny violent crime rate per capita compared with, say, Chicago, and it’s hard to think of that as anything other than a very significant data point. Big cities with restrictive gun control laws have more violent crime. Cities with very few restrictions on our Constitutionally-provided right to bear arms have much less violent crime. Very suggestive, if not conclusive. The other explanation is more sinister: gun control activists are aware that their stupid gun control laws aren’t going to reduce violent crime, but they want to disarm the law-abiding citizen so as to make him more controllable. Either way, gun control laws should be fought vigorously, because they only make any problem much worse.

“Settled Science” and other oxymorons

It’s not good to “toot your own horn”; however, there does come a time when, in order to be taken seriously, you have to trot out your bona fides, so here I go:

I have a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Virginia Tech. That means I’ve studied quite a lot of theoretical physics. I would say I have a Ph.D. level knowledge of math, an M.S. knowledge of physics, a B.S. knowledge of computer science, and an A.S. knowledge of electrical engineering. Since getting my Ph.D., I have done over 7 years of experimental science or engineering. I have taught statistics at the high school level twice, I am studying mathematical statistics on my own (nearly done!), and I have studied the New Causal Revolution by reading The Book of Why and Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer in detail.

The upshot of all that is that I’m confident I understand the scientific method better than probably 99% of the world’s population. I’ve seen it from the inside and the outside, and I’ve studied its main tool: statistics.

In my previous post, I outlined a number of problems with modern science. But there are others, and one of them that I want to talk a little more about are some major issues with the way people talk about COVID.

There’s no such thing as “settled science”. When someone uses that phrase, or anything close to it like this, “The science is clear on that point,” when the point has only come up in the last few years, then you can be certain that that someone is trying to pull a fast one on you. Aristotle’s physics held sway for roughly two millennia. When Newton’s physics displaced Aristotle’s, that lasted much less time – only a few centuries. Now that we have quantum mechanics (including the Standard Model) and general relativity, physicists have been working very hard at displacing those. So physics, easily the most certain of all the sciences, is not settled (except maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics)! How can anyone in the life sciences talk about COVID, vaccines, natural immunity, boosters, etc., with anything approaching certainty? What you should be hearing is this, “Well, we really know absolutely nothing about what we’re talking about…” because that would be nearer the truth.

I’m convinced that no one knows much of anything about COVID, COVID vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc. Point me to a study concerning COVID, and I can probably poke statistical holes in it, most likely fatal. Hardly any papers use the modern causal revolution, and yet they make causal claims without an experiment! And don’t even get me started on COVID data. I doubt that anyone has any reliable data on COVID. There are systemic reporting problems on just about all the COVID data you could ever find, ranging from a lack of standard definitions, to poor categorization, to outright manipulation, etc.

So for people to urge you to “follow the science”, the proper reaction is, “Well, I could, but I think I’ll get whiplash.” Or another reaction is, “So how do you follow constantly shifting shadows with no patterns, again?”

If no one knows anything about COVID or COVID vaccines, it follows that the term “misinformation” is usually mis-applied. How is anyone to know whether something is true or not, when basically no one knows anything? The term “misinformation” appears, most of the time, to be used on anyone who is the slightest bit vaccine hesitant, as if taking a vaccine with known side effects (some of which are severe), that is not known to prevent transmission, and which used aborted fetal cell lines either in development, production, or testing, is an insane position to take. None of the statements I just uttered are seriously debated by anyone. Using the term “misinformation” merely to describe the side of a debate with which you disagree is dishonest, to say the least. Logically speaking, it’s a circular reasoning fallacy combined with poisoning the well: whether someone’s claim is “misinformation” is exactly what’s up for debate! And if you can first label your opponent’s position as “misinformation”, then the audience might tend to disbelieve your opponent’s position and anything he says.

You have to wonder where is the pressure to vaccinate originating? My claim is that it is Bill Gates, who has invested a large portion of his gigantic fortune in vaccines, who is to blame for the insanity of modern vaccines. I think he has abused his immense political power to distort the field of vaccines for his own personal gain.

But I’m very uninterested in ever hearing the terms “settled science” or “misinformation” again. They have no meaning.

Solving Systemic Problems in the Scientific Community

Modern science has run into very hard times. There is the well-documented reproducibility crisis, political bias, monetary bias, big government bias, incentives to publish a lot of papers however poor in quality they are, and no doubt others. What are the solutions to these problems? I will propose a list of solutions to the various problems, along with short explanations as to why I think they will work, if implemented.

1. Publishing a lot of very poor quality papers. This is a many-faceted problem, so I will sub-head underneath it. a. One cause is the “publish or perish” mentality at universities. This encourages far too many professors to go for the “low-hanging fruit” of small, inconsequential papers, as well as to cut corners and not do their research with correct statistics. Universities need to ditch “publish or perish” entirely by changing how they evaluate their professors. The number of papers or number of citations is simply not a great indicator of quality. Take Don Knuth (I think it was) and his 20-year hiatus from publishing, followed by earth-shatteringly important papers. How does that fit in with “publish or perish”? b. Another cause of poor papers is a severe lack of knowledge of statistics and how to avoid errors. Coupled with this is probably the more sinister prospect of making up data, p-hacking, and other intentional distortions to obtain “statistical significance.” A lack of knowledge could be combated with much stiffer statistics course requirements for researchers, as well as requirements to collaborate with statisticians before the researchers run the experiment. Statisticians study the design and analysis of experiments, and much of what they study is non-trivial. The more sinister prospect can probably only be fixed by requiring a great deal more reproducibility. c. Another cause of poor papers is a broken peer-review process, which includes everything from non-anonymous reviews to conflicts-of-interest, to incompetent reviewers, to a total lack of interest in publishing negative results, etc. This is on the journals: they need to get their act together and value real science, not just the latest and greatest.

2. Political bias. Naturally, scientists are people, and people are entitled to their political opinions. However, when those political opinions influence their science, the science goes awry. Witness the climate change science debacle. Because of political pressure, leftist scientists have convinced millions of people that the earth is going to self-destruct from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). As some wags have mentioned, this is “too good a crisis to be true.” We are very right to question, first of all, whether global warming is even occurring, and if so, whether it is man-made, and if so, whether it is catastrophic. All three of those steps are debatable. Now do not read me as saying we should trash the environment. No, we are to be good stewards of the environment: curbing pollution is a good idea. Thinking about landfills and other trash-processing stations is a very good idea. Not littering is a good idea. But to impose draconian restrictions on companies on the basis only of computer models is totalitarian and tyrannical. The government needs to get out of the business of funding scientific research, because it simply taints whatsoever it touches. That alone would probably fix a good many of the problems we’re seeing in science these days.

3. Monetary bias. One good example of this that we’re seeing right now is Bill Gates, who has put his considerable fortune towards vaccines. Now I am not anti-vax. Who wouldn’t want safe, effective, ethically-developed vaccines? I would claim that few vaccines on the market, for any virus, qualify for all three of those. But because Bill Gates has put his weight behind vaccines, all of a sudden we get insane things like vaccine mandates coming our way. Mandates! As if the government knows what is medically best for each person. The way to solve this problem is to drastically change (read: restrict) how money can flow to or from the government. Carefully restricted taxes are, of course, essential to have a government at all, which I’m certainly in favor of. But other than that, money should not flow to the government in any way. Goods or services must not flow to the government in any way other than being paid for at market price. What we have in the US is simply monstrous-scale bribery in the form of “lobbying”. If lobbying were only presenting arguments in favor of a bill or against a bill, I wouldn’t complain in the slightest. But it’s much more than that! Money going from the government to the people is also extremely problematic. That’s what people like Joe Biden do to try to bribe the American people into voting Democrat. Thankfully, the American people are seeing through that, and it’s not helping Biden’s abysmal approval ratings.

4. Reproducibility crisis. The solution to this crisis must be three-fold. One is that statistics education must greatly increase. A single course in the typical sociology or psychology program is insufficient. It’s also entirely possible to achieve a Ph.D. in experimental science (physics, chemistry, biology) with nary a statistics course in sight! How colleges and universities structure their programs matters, and statistics is a course so incredibly important that I believe it ought to be required for every single degree offered. That’s right: Every. Single. Degree. Statistics is the course that can arm students against fallacies of inductive reasoning, just as a good introductory logic course is what can arm students against fallacies of deductive reasoning. The second arm for fixing this crisis is an ethical one: researchers must not only know good statistics, they must have the wisdom to carry it out. Fixing that is in some ways much more difficult. It helps if, as I’ve written above, the incentives to falsify research are removed. The gospel helps greatly. Teaching courses on the ethics of good research are probably not quite so effective, though they may not hurt. The third arm, which I have also mentioned before, is that statisticians need to be involved in much more of the experimental process than they often are. As Ronald Fisher, the eminent statistician, once wrote, “To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.” Yet another aspect of this crisis is the inability to publish negative results. We need to have a lot more journals willing to publish negative results.

Language as Oppression?

One thing rather puzzles me about the Far Left (meaning, Marxism/identity politics/intersectionality/socialism/communism/postmodernism): how is it that they use language at all? The English language, like probably every single language ever to have existed, has been used to oppress people in horrible ways. In the absolutist framework of the Far Left, how do they dare to make use of the English language? They should invent their own language, free from any history of oppression, don’t you think? Here’s an imaginary conversation between the far-leftist Carly Marxy and conservative Rog’n Scrut’n:

Marxy: Down with oppression! Down with oppress-

Scrut’n: Wait a minute, aren’t you using English? You need to use a language that has never been used to oppress people before.

Marxy: Mmh. I sseug ouy era thgir. Nwod htiw noisserppo! Nwod htiw noisserppo!

Scrut’n (chuckling to himself): Well, there’s one Far Leftist whom I’ve successfully de-platformed.