Previous Month | RSS/XML | Current

WEBLOG

August 12th, 2021 (Permalink)

Here We Go Again: Florida's New Record Number of Cases

Some journalists think that this summer is a replay of last summer, as witnessed by the following headline:

Florida still breaking records for daily COVID cases;
single-day high reaches 28,3171

We're also back to the dreaded "surge" of last summer, according to the story beneath the headline:

The coronavirus surge in Florida continues with another record-breaking day of new cases reported Monday. Florida's daily case count reported Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows 28,317 new cases for Sunday and 28,316 for Saturday, both significantly higher than the record-breaking case count of 23,908 reported Friday.1

This time we can't blame the news media, at least not entirely, as later reports revealed that the numbers released by the government were false:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adjusted a discrepancy with Florida COVID-19 data on Tuesday, though the new numbers still are not the same as those provided by the state. On Monday, the CDC reported the state saw another record number of new COVID cases. But the Florida Department of Health disagreed. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 28,317 new cases in the state. Numbers from Sunday showed 28,316 people tested positive. The Florida Department of Health said those numbers were accumulated over "multiple days" and later provided the following figures:
  • Friday, Aug. 6: 21,500
  • Saturday Aug. 7: 19,567
  • Sunday, Aug. 8: 15,319
  • 3-day average: 18,795

Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Monday that he suspected that, since the CDC does not report on Sundays and Florida sent in three days worth of data, the federal agency combined the numbers.2

This is a puzzling explanation. What does it mean to "combine" the numbers? It can't mean addition, since adding just two of the days produces at least 35K cases, and all three add up to more than 55K. "Combine" also can't be the mean average of all three numbers since, as shown, that average is about 10K less than the number put out by the CDC. Here's a somewhat plausible explanation of how the CDC arrived at the numbers they reported:

One of the state's leading epidemiologists said it appears the federal agency made a simple math error. "It appears the CDC divided by two instead of three," said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who runs one of the most comprehensive and closely watched COVID-19 trackers in the state. Instead of spreading the 56,386 cases the state recorded from Friday through Sunday over three days, it spread them over two days, which inflated the one-day tally, he said. The only significance was that Florida didn’t set a new one-day record on Sunday for new cases. The record, set on Friday with 21,500 new cases, still stands.3

This explanation doesn't work perfectly, since half of 56,386 is 28,193, which is close to, but not exactly, what the CDC reported. 56,386 is the sum you get if you add up the numbers for Friday through Sunday provided by the FDOH. The explanation does explain one odd thing: I was struck by the fact that the numbers reported by the CDC for Saturday and Sunday differed by only one case―28,317 and 28,316―which could be explained as the result of dividing an odd number of cases by two, then allotting the remainder to one of the two days. If this explanation is correct, then the FDOH must have reported 56,633 cases to the CDC. I guess this could be called "combining" three days worth of cases into two.

The same article that reported the bogus number quoted above also reports that "232 people died from COVID-19 in the last two days1". It was published Monday so that the deaths would have occurred over the weekend. The article reporting the corrections also states:

The CDC reported 28,317 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. Along with the over 28,000 cases, 120 deaths were also logged, according to data from the agency.2

So, the 120 would also have been on Sunday. Currently, the CDC reports 21 deaths on Sunday and 17 on Saturday for a total of 383. So, where did the 120 and 232 come from? Are they also false numbers? The article doesn't tell us, and I can't find any indication that the FDOH corrected either of these numbers4.

Two things do seem to be different this summer from last:

  1. The CDC is putting out false data. I don't recall this happening last summer. Last year, it was the news media that reported a series of bogus "records" that were the result of multiple days' worth of statistics being reported as if they all occurred on the same day5. Apparently, something similar happened here, but the CDC was the culprit.
  2. The state department of health is correcting it. I don't remember the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) making any effort last summer to correct the news media's misleading reporting. The correction article quoted above also reports:
    During the first year of the pandemic, the Florida Department of Health released daily COVID-19 case numbers. It switched to weekly numbers recently though, relying on the CDC to track the daily numbers instead.2

    The report doesn't explain why the FDOH made this change, but it may be because of the alarmist reporting of "record highs" last summer. Of course, the FDOH didn't count on the CDC releasing false data.

Update (8/13/2021): Yesterday, as I was writing the above entry, The Texas Tribune published an article with the following claims: "Over 5,800 children in Texas were newly hospitalized with COVID-19 in the seven-day period ending on Aug. 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 37% increase from a week prior.7" Later the same day, the article was corrected to the following, which is what you'll read if you look at it today:

From the start of the pandemic through Aug. 9, over 5,800 children in Texas have been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 783 children admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID-19 between July 1 and Aug. 9.8

In addition, the following notice was added to the top of the article:

Correction, Aug. 12, 2021: An earlier version of this story overstated the number of children who have been hospitalized in Texas recently with COVID-19. The story said over 5,800 children had been hospitalized during a seven-day period in August, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number correctly referred to children hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began. In actuality, 783 children were admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID-19 between July 1 and Aug. 9 of this year.8

I can't tell from the correction note whether the fault here lies with the CDC or with the reporter, who may have simply misread the CDC's statistics.

Why do these sort of mistakes always exaggerate the effects of the disease? The CDC's mistake about Florida nearly doubled the number of cases on Sunday, the supposed new record high, and the exaggeration in the Texas case is even worse. Notice that even the correction exaggerates by comparing apples to oranges: in the mistake, 5,800 was supposed to be the number of children hospitalized in the first week of this month, whereas the corrected figure of 783 includes the entire month of July.

To make this a fair comparison, let's look at the figures per day: The mistake claimed that over 828 children were admitted per day, whereas the correction has it under twenty. So, the mistake exaggerates the number of children hospitalized by over forty times.

Why do these mistakes always support the story being told by the news media? You seldom see a correction that strengthens an article's claims. Notice that the Texas error is in an article that still bears the headline:

Texas children and children's hospitals are under siege from two viruses: RSV and COVID-192

They're "under siege", just like the Alamo! Of course, 828 children hospitalized a day probably would put Texas hospitals "under siege", but what about only twenty?

Update (8/16/2021): Finally, Florida has changed the way that it reports COVID-19 cases and deaths so that now they are assigned to the day they actually occurred, rather than being released to the press on whatever day the state department of health happened to receive notice of them. As I explained in considerable detail last summer5, the past practice led to a steady series of misleading headlines of "record high deaths". Understandably, such reporting led to political pressure to react in counter-productive ways.

Unsurprisingly, the news media is unhappy that now it will be more difficult for it to create such tabloid headlines. For instance, here's how a Florida newspaper reported the change: "Just as a highly contagious new delta variant sent Florida into a vicious COVID-19 surge, the state Department of Health changed the way it reports cases and deaths attributed to the virus.9" Notice the emotive language: the "surge" is "vicious". Also, notice the juxtaposition: the change was made "just as" the "vicious surge" began, insinuating without evidence that there's some connection between the two.

After seven paragraphs suggesting that there's something wrong with the change, the article finally gets around to describing it: "Florida changed its COVID reporting method Tuesday and now reports when cases or deaths actually occurred rather than when they were communicated to the state―allowing health officials to assign cases or deaths to days in the past rather than the present." What's wrong with that? If the cases or deaths happened in the past, then shouldn't that be where they are assigned, rather than in the present when they didn't happen?

Yet, the article claims in the second paragraph: "The result: Florida no longer provides a real-time picture of how COVID is impacting the state." Not true! How would assigning cases and deaths to the day they occur, rather than when they are reported to the state, mean that the state is no longer providing a "real-time picture" of the progress of the disease? The former reporting system gave a false picture of the disease's progress, marked by waves of cases and deaths that were obviously artifacts of the system. When a backlog of cases was suddenly dumped by local and county health departments onto the state, the news media would jump on it and pronounce it a "record high" number of cases, when it was only a record in the number of cases reported to the state.

The article inadvertently reveals what the news media objects to: "Since Tuesday, Florida continued to revise its information based on the actual dates of cases or deaths, even adjusting some record-breaking daily case counts downward." That very fact reveals that the "records" were not genuine but artificial ones generated by backlogs.

An expert is quoted: "'For Florida to move to a new system of reporting is technically correct, but in actuality, it is problematic because it distorts data,' said Bill Ku, a data scientist and former researcher at Columbia University…". How does a "technically correct" change distort data? If it distorts data then it can't be technically correct. In fact, it's the previous method that distorted data, which had to be corrected later.

My best guess about what Ku may have had in mind is that there will be a lag time in reporting some cases, which means that the last week or two of cases―depending on how long the lag time is―will tend to be under-reported. The article includes a chart that shows the numbers of deaths rising according to the old method, and falling according to the new one. The legend on the chart explains that:

On Aug. 10, Florida revised its reporting method, adjusting the COVID-19 death counts to reflect the actual days when the deaths occurred rather than when they were reported. The lag between a death and the date it was reported creates an artificial appearance that deaths are decreasing.

What it doesn't explain is that the old method inflated the number of deaths by including ones that occurred on earlier days. Both trend lines are potentially deceptive, but it's only the older method that allowed news outlets to hype the latest "record high" deaths for several days in a row.

In the original entry, above, I pointed out that the CDC had originally claimed a total of 232 deaths in Florida over the first full weekend of this month, and 120 on Sunday, whereas they later showed only 17 on Saturday and 21 on Sunday. The CDC is now showing 103 deaths on Saturday and 65 on Sunday the eighth, for a total of 168 over the weekend, which is quite a bit less than what the CDC originally reported but closer. The change is probably due to the lag in reporting. Given that over a week has passed since, these numbers shouldn't change much more.

There is a potential for misunderstanding both ways of reporting cases and deaths, but the news media never bothered to explain the problem with the previous method, presumably because there was never an incentive to do so. Now there is.

By the way, this article is by the same journalist who reported the false CDC numbers discussed in the original entry, above. In that case, it was the CDC that was at fault for spreading incorrect numbers. In this case, it's the reporter's fault.

Notes:

  1. Cindy Krischer Goodman, "Florida still breaking records for daily COVID cases; single-day high reaches 28,317", South Florida Sun Sentinel, 8/9/2021. This false news is still available uncorrected from Yahoo News, but the South Florida Sun Sentinel seems to have scrubbed it from their website.
  2. Dale Greenstein & Rachael Krause, "CDC adjusts Florida COVID case numbers after discrepancy Monday", Bay News 9, 8/11/2021.
  3. Jane Musgrave, "Florida accuses CDC of inflating COVID numbers in apparent CDC mistake", The Palm Beach Post, 8/10/2021.
  4. I've emailed the FDOH with a query but haven't received a reply yet. I'll update this entry if and when I do.
  5. Florida's Record-High Death Tolls, 8/12/2020.
  6. "Trends in Number of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in the US Reported to CDC, by State/Territory", The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed: 8/12/2021; see under "Florida" and "Daily Deaths".
  7. Reese Oxner, "Texas children and children's hospitals are under siege from two viruses: RSV and COVID-19", The Texas Tribune, 8/12/2021. This is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's capture of the original article. As explained above, the current version of the article has been corrected.
  8. Reese Oxner, "Texas children and children's hospitals are under siege from two viruses: RSV and COVID-19", The Texas Tribune, 8/12/2021. This is the current, corrected version of the article.
  9. Cindy Krischer Goodman, "Florida no longer provides a real-time picture of how COVID is impacting the state", South Florida Sun Sentinel, 8/16/2021. All subsequent quotes are from this article.
August 10th, 2021 (Revised: 8/11/20216) (Permalink)

Think Twice Before Splitting an Infinitive

Many of today's linguists are would-be icon smashers. They see their job as pulling down the statues honoring alleged rules of grammar or word meaning. A favorite target of their wrath is the alleged grammatical rule against splitting infinitives. I write "alleged" because I was never taught such a rule, and I'm no youngster. If there ever was such a rule, it's been dead for longer than most of us have been alive. Though the linguists see themselves as iconoclasts fighting a stodgy establishment, they are the defenders of the current conventional wisdom.

The bogeywoman of these linguists is an elderly schoolmarm, her greying hair tied up in a tight bun at the back of her head, rapping her students' knuckles with a ruler whenever they split an infinitive. We even know her name: Miss Bertha Thistlebottom1. Thankfully, I never learned grammar in Miss Thistlebottom's class, but then I was never taught grammar at all as far as I can remember. In high school, I didn't know an adjective from an adage. Instead, I had to teach myself grammar long after "grammar" school, no thanks to the linguists.

In addition to Thistlebottom, the favorite whipping boys of such linguists are William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, authors of The Elements of Style. Unlike Thistlebottom, they were both real people, but are now as dead as the rule against splitting infinitives. Their little book is loathed in a way that is hard to explain except as a result of jealousy at its surprising and continuing success. So, what do Strunk & White have to say about splitting infinitives? Surely, like Miss Thistlebottom, they condemn it as an illiterate grammatical error?

No such thing. Here's everything that S&W had to say about the subject in the first edition of the Elements, published in 1959:

There is precedent from the fourteenth century downward for interposing an adverb between to and the infinitive it governs, but the construction is for the most part avoided by the careful writer. …

The split infinitive is another trick of rhetoric in which the ear must be quicker than the handbook. Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stovewood does. "I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow." The sentence is relaxed, the meaning is clear, the violation is harmless and scarcely perceptible. Put the other way, the sentence becomes stiff, needlessly formal. A matter of ear.2

What rigid traditionalists!

Despite inveighing against our latitudinarian linguists, above, albeit with tongue in cheek, I have no intention of defending Miss Thistlebottom. There is no grammatical rule against splitting English infinitives―what's more, there never was. However, it's a good linguistic rule of thumb to avoid it, as S&W suggest.

S&W don't explain why the "careful writer" should avoid splitting infinitives, but here's one reason: split infinitives can be ambiguous, and the careful writer, or speaker, avoids ambiguity3. To see why this is so, let's examine the most famous split infinitive of them all, from the narration at the beginning of the original 1960s Star Trek television series:

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: … To boldly go where no man has gone before!4

There are two possible ways to avoid splitting the infinitive "to go" with the adverb "boldly" in the final phrase:

  1. To go boldly where no man has gone before!

    Here, the adverb modifies the verb that it is next to, that is, "boldly" modifies "go", which we can indicate this way: To [go boldly] where no man has gone before. "Boldly" is thus an adverb of manner that tells us in what manner―namely, with boldness―to go where no man has gone before.

  2. Boldly to go where no man has gone before!

    This alternative may sound rather unnatural, but you can get used to it. The adverb is separated by "to" from the verb, so it modifies the entire remainder of the phrase, which we can indicate as follows: Boldly [to go where no man has gone before]. In other words, going where no man has gone before is a bold thing to do.

So, these two phrases do not mean the same thing. In the first, it is the manner of doing the action that is bold; whereas, in the second, it is the action itself that is bold. That these are not the same thing can perhaps be seen more clearly in a different example: "To go through the door". "Boldly to go through the door" would mean that the act of going through the door itself was bold. Suppose that one knew that there was a sleeping tiger on the other side of the door, then the very act of going through the door would be bold. In contrast, "to go boldly through the door" does not mean that simply going through the door is itself bold, but that the door is entered in a bold way, say, by throwing it open and striding rapidly through.

Which of these two possible meanings were intended by Gene Roddenberry4? By splitting the infinitive, the adverb can be interpreted in either way. Was the Enterprise supposed to go where no man has gone before in a bold manner, say, zooming into other star systems at warp speed, not raising shields, and so on? Or, is it that the very mission of going where no man has gone before is a bold one, which certainly sounds true?

With these distinctions in mind, we can see that it's possible to meaningfully say: "Boldly to go cautiously where no man has gone before", though that doesn't mean you should do so. It may sound like an oxymoron, but needn't be so interpreted. The first adverb, "Boldly", means that going where no man has gone before is a bold thing to do, while the second, "cautiously", describes the manner in which that bold thing is done. So, "boldly to go cautiously through the door" would mean that going cautiously through the door was a bold thing to do, since there is a sleeping tiger on the other side. Doing so cautiously would mean something like opening the door slowly, and sidling through quietly in order not to awaken the tiger. Though it's possible to make sense of infinitives that are modified by two adverbs in this way, I wouldn't recommend forcing your audience to do so.

Now, sometimes the careful writer wants to be ambiguous. Did Gene Roddenberry, who apparently added the split infinitive to the opening narration for Star Trek4, intend it to be ambiguous between 1 and 2, above? Did he want to boldly split infinitives that no man had dared to split before? I don't know, but I do know that a careful writer should be aware of the potential for ambiguity in doing so.

However, sometimes you may need to split an infinitive in order to avoid ambiguity. For instance, consider the sentence:

The difficulty in assessing his achievements is that he tries to absurdly exaggerate them5.

Here, the infinitive "to exaggerate" is split by the adverb "absurdly". So, let's move it before "to":

The difficulty in assessing his achievements is that he tries absurdly to exaggerate them.

Now it's ambiguous as to whether the adverb modifies "tries" or the infinitive: is it the trying that is absurd or the exaggeration? Putting the adverb directly after the infinitive sounds absurd, but it could be placed at the end of the sentence:

The difficulty in assessing his achievements is that he tries to exaggerate them absurdly.

This places the adverb as far away from the infinitive it modifies as possible, which is generally not good practice, but at least it makes sense. So, unless we put the adverb all the way at the end of the sentence, the only way to avoid ambiguity is to split the infinitive. I'll let you judge which is better.

Does this mean that you're damned if you split and damned if you don't? No, rather, it means no simple rule governs whether to split an infinitive. The careful writer has to be a careful thinker, keeping in mind that both splitting and not splitting can lead to ambiguity.

So, your future mission is: boldly to split infinitives cautiously.

Notes:

  1. See: Theodore M. Bernstein, Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage (1984). Despite its tilting at a straw woman in its title, this is a sensible usage guide, and more entertainingly written than most such books. Bernstein was not a linguist but a New York Times editor.
  2. William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White, The Elements of Style (1959), pp. 46 & 64. Strunk, in the original version of the book published in 1918 before White revised it, and presumably when Miss Thistlebottom still ruled the classroom, wrote not one word about split infinitives. See: The Elements of Style (1918).
  3. I learned about this type of ambiguity from philosopher and logician Michael Dummett's book: Grammar & Style for Examination Candidates and Others (1993), p. 79.
  4. Caroline Cubé, "To Boldly Go: the Hurried Evolution of Star Trek's Opening Narration", UCLA Library, 10/11/2016.
  5. See: H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2nd edition, 1965), under "split infinitive". The example is based on a real one quoted by Fowler. Dummett also mentions this type of ambiguity; see p. 78.
  6. I revised this to clarify the Star Trek example, to add a disambiguation of the Fowler/Dummett example that occurred to me after the entry was posted, and to make some stylistic improvements.
Puzzle
August 4th, 2021 (Permalink)

The Return of Three-Dice Monty

"Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and try your luck," Monty* bellowed to the crowd passing his midway booth. "As a blind man could plainly see if he had eyes, I have here three fair and unloaded dice." He waved his hand at a strange contraption that was attached to the top of the counter at the front of his booth: it was an hourglass-shaped cage, hinged at the narrow middle part with a handle sticking out towards Monty. In the lower section of the cage, sitting on its bottom, were three large dice.

A few members of the crowd stopped and drifted over to Monty's booth. "When I turn this here handle," Monty continued, at a lower decibel level, "the dice tumble together, and then when I stop turning it, the dice fall to the bottom." Monty cranked the handle a few times and the cage rotated, the dice rattling around inside, then finally coming to rest at the bottom again.

"Now, here's what I'm going to do: you pick a number from one to six. Any number you choose! You bet a dollar on that number. I will give these dice a tumble and if your lucky number comes up once," he said, holding up his forefinger, "you win a dollar. If your number comes up twice," he held up two fingers, "you win two dollars. And if your number comes up thrice," and he held up three fingers, "you win three dollars!

"Now, there's a one in six chance of your chosen number coming up on a single die," Monty continued. "Given that what comes up on any one of these dice doesn't affect the others, that would mean the chance of your number coming up is one-sixth plus one-sixth plus one-sixth, which adds up to one-half! If your number don't come up, then you lose a buck; but if it does, you win at least one. If that ain't a fair bet, what is it?

"What's more, if your lucky number comes up twice, you win double! If it comes up three times, you win triple! How can you lose? Now, put your money down right here on your favorite number!"

Should you bet on Monty's dice game? Is it a fair bet? Are the odds really in your favor or in Monty's?

Extra Credit: How much does a player stand to win or lose in the long run?

* In case you haven't met Monty before: he's a trickster who always speaks the truth and nothing but the truth, but he doesn't always tell the whole truth. Moreover, he disdains the use of sleight-of-hand or gimmicks, using sleight-of-mind, instead. For previous puzzles involving Monty, see:

August 2nd, 2021 (Permalink)

Flaunt or Flout

Another common confusion that your spell-checking program won't catch1 is that between "flaunt" and "flout". The spelling and pronunciation of these two words is similar, which contributes to their confusion, but their meanings are very different. Both are transitive verbs, so that even a grammar-checking program probably won't stop you from confusing them. "To flaunt" means to show something off, especially in a flamboyant or offensive manner2; whereas, "to flout" means to intentionally and openly break a rule3. As with the use of "perpetuate" when what is meant is "perpetrate"4, this mistake seems to go only one way: "flaunt" is written when "flout" is meant.

Almost all of the usage books that I've checked warn against this confusion5, so it appears to be surprisingly common. I've noticed it myself previously, but was recently reminded of it by the following passage from a book:

"Under any definition, the Defendant has flaunted the system," [Judge] Lester wrote. In that "flaunt" means "show something off" Zimmerman "flaunted" the system under no known definition―Lester meant "flout"….6

Don't flaunt your ignorance by flouting the distinction between these two words.

Notes:

  1. For previous entries in this series, see:
  2. "Flaunt", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 8/2/2021.
  3. "Flout", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 8/2/2021. An older meaning of "to flout" was "to mock or scorn", which is the meaning found in Shakespeare. The modern meaning contains a remnant of this old meaning in that to flout a rule means to break it in a flagrant way that shows disdain for it.
  4. See: Perpetrate or Perpetuate, 7/2/2021.
  5. One odd exception is Strunk & White, who do not mention it in their chapter on commonly misused words and expressions, see: William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White, The Elements of Style (4th edition, 1999), ch. 4.
  6. Jack Cashill, 'If I Had a Son': Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman (2013), p. 144.

Previous Month

If you are a player looking for new Canadian online casinos to play at, check out https://livecasinoonline.ca/new-casinos - the most authoritative guide to new casinos in Canada. Only safe and licensed operators.

Casino Bonuses are not easy to find on the internet. There are simply too many and their terms and conditions makes them difficult to compare. You can find the best bonuses at casinopilot.

Most online slot players have heard of the gamblers fallacy but we would suggest you simply do your homework before you play in order limit your risk. Sites like SlotsOnlineCanada are the go-to Canadian online slots portal on everything from new slot bonuses, slot game reviews and up-to-date news on the iGaming industry.

You will never be able to dispel the truth and reasoning behind the gamblers fallacy, however if you read these winning insights on pokies you may find that you gain a slight upper hand.

Don’t waste your time looking for worthy new online casinos, as https://newcasinouk.com/ already did all the hard work for you. Check out top lists with latest casinos on the market and register an account today.

If you want to play casino for free, you should check out freespinsnodeposituk.com for a complete list of casinos.

You can find the best casinos at MrCasinova.com as this website update online casinos and compare them on daily basis.

Recommended Reading
July 31st, 2021 (Permalink)

Let the Children Play
& Was Naomi Wolf Always Full of It?

Notes:

  1. I first mentioned the minimal risk to children at the end of the following entry: Mayday! Mayday!, 5/1/2020. If I had realized a year ago that people would still not understand this simple fact, I would have put more emphasis on it.
  2. See: Sonal Desai, "On My Mind: They Blinded Us From Science", Franklin Templeton, 7/29/2020.
  3. For previous entries on public ignorance and misunderstanding of the risks of COVID-19, see:
  4. See: David Wallace-Wells, "COVID-19 Targets the Elderly. Why Don't Our Prevention Efforts?", New York Magazine, 5/13/2020.
  5. See:
  6. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), pp. 11-12. I discussed this statistic previously here: Be your own fact checker!, 2/15/2012.

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in these articles, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging them, I have sometimes changed the paragraphing and rearranged the order of the excerpts in order to emphasize points.

Java Jive
July 27th, 2021 (Permalink)

Honey, I shrunk my brain!

Most medical research about coffee and health suggests that drinking coffee is good for you, and can even lengthen your life1. Unfortunately, almost all such research is observational rather than experimental, which means that it cannot establish causation. Usually, the researchers simply compare coffee drinkers and abstainers. If people who drink coffee live longer on average than those who don't drink it, or drink less of it, then the study shows an association between coffee drinking and longer life.

However, such a relationship is not necessarily causal: it doesn't show that drinking coffee causes longer life. Any two groups of people differ in many ways, and it may be some other difference between the two groups that accounts for the association. For instance, it may be that some chronically ill people avoid coffee and also tend to die younger than healthy coffee-drinkers.

Here's a recent example of the occasional headline-grabbing study that goes in the opposite direction:

Too much coffee can cause your brain to shrink, raises risk of dementia, study finds2

Fortunately, this study is also observational, so it can't establish what the headline claims, namely, that coffee can cause the brain to shrink. Moreover, the study didn't show that anyone's brain actually shrank. The researchers compared groups of people based on how much coffee they reported drinking, and those who drank six or more cups a day had smaller brain volumes than those who drank less. So, for all that we can tell from this study, those who drank more coffee simply had lower-volume brains all along. Perhaps there's something about having a lower-volume brain that leads to higher-volume coffee intake.

In any case, the researchers and the author of the press release3 for the study were careful not to claim anything more than an association between higher coffee consumption and lower brain volume. Also, there's nothing about shrinkage, significant or not, in the paper's abstract4 or the release. The brain shrinkage claim comes from news articles that otherwise just rewrite the press release.

Sadly, this is a typical example of most health and science reporting nowadays. In order not to be misled, the reader must disregard the tabloid-style headline, then read between the lines of the underlying article in order to find out what the study reported actually found.

Update (8/6/2021): Research Check published an article analyzing this study5 that appeared after mine, above. It's a careful and thorough job, and even peer-reviewed! You can check my work by comparing the two.

Notes:

  1. See:
  2. "Too much coffee can cause your brain to shrink, raises risk of dementia, study finds", Study Finds, 7/24/2021.
  3. "Excess coffee: A bitter brew for brain health", University of South Australia, 7/22/2021.
  4. Kitty Pham, et al., "High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke", Taylor & Francis Online, 7/24/2021. The abstract of the study.
  5. Lachlan Van Schaik, "Could drinking 6 cups of coffee a day shrink your brain and increase dementia risk?", Research Check, 8/3/2021.

Disclaimer: I am not a physician, nor do I play one on television. I do drink coffee, but not over six cups a day. The above entry is offered for information and entertainment purposes only, and not intended as medical advice. If you experience significant brain shrinkage, see your personal physician immediately.

Poll Watch
July 19th, 2021 (Permalink)

Errors of Unusual Magnitude

As I mentioned earlier this year1, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) created a "task force" to study the performance of last year's general election polls2. Its report is now out3 but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

We already know that last year's polls were bad4, but just how bad were they? One thing that the new report did is to quantify how poorly the polls performed. The Washington Post's Dan Balz reports: "Public opinion polls in the 2020 presidential election suffered from errors of 'unusual magnitude,' the highest in 40 years for surveys estimating the national popular vote and in at least 20 years for state-level polls, according to a study conducted by [AAPOR].5"

I've mentioned in the past that very many polls are taken in a presidential election year, but I've never known just how many. Now, the AAPOR report tells us that the group examined 529 presidential polls from last year. I bring up the large number of polls not just because I think it's an absurd waste of time, effort, and money―though I do―but because given the usual confidence level of such polls, we can expect that 5% of them will be wrong by greater than the usual margin of error6. So, we could expect around 26 of last year's polls to be off by more than three percentage points.

Also, it was clear that the polls over-estimated support for Democratic candidates, but by how much? Based on the Real Clear Politics average of national polls, I calculated last year that they showed Biden winning by a margin of 4.3 percentage points of the popular vote greater than he won. According to the AAPOR report, this margin was only 3.9 points, so my calculation was not too far off.

According to The Post's report, the AAPOR report seems to have ruled out most explanations of the large error except:

One possible explanation is that Republicans who responded to surveys voted differently than Republicans who choose not to respond to pollsters. The task force said this was a reasonable assumption, given declining trust in institutions generally and Trump's repeated characterizations of most polls by mainstream news organizations as fake or faulty. "That the polls overstated Biden's support more in Whiter, more rural, and less densely populated states is suggestive (but not conclusive) that the polling error resulted from too few Trump supporters responding to polls," the report states. "A larger polling error was found in states with more Trump supporters."

The report makes an excellent point which has been an ongoing theme of these "Poll Watch" entries:

The report emphasizes that though often quite accurate, polls are not as precise as sometimes assumed and therefore given to misinterpretation, especially in the most competitive races. "Most pre-election polls lack the precision necessary to predict the outcome of semi-close contests," the report states. "Despite the desire to use polls to determine results in a close race, the precision of polls is often far less than the precision that is assumed by poll consumers."

When I've had a chance to read the whole report I'll update this entry or write a new one if I discover anything else in it worth writing about.

Notes:

  1. What biased last year's polls?, 4/27/2021.
  2. "AAPOR Convenes Task Force to Formally Examine Polling Performance During 2020 Presidential Election", American Association for Public Opinion Research, 2/13/2020.
  3. Josh Clinton, et al., "Task Force on 2020 Pre-Election Polling: An Evaluation of the 2020 General Election Polls", American Association for Public Opinion Research, 7/19/2021.
  4. Post Mortem, 11/11/2020.
  5. Dan Balz, "2020 presidential polls suffered worst performance in decades, report says", The Washington Post, 7/18/2021. Subsequent quotes from this article; paragraphing suppressed.
  6. For the confidence level and margin of error of polls, see my: How to Read a Poll.
New Book
July 15th, 2021 (Permalink)

There ain't no such thing as free knowledge.

Quote: "Free knowledge from an encyclopedia―that would be a glorious thing. It is a shame that it is impossible. Knowledge is something that exists in minds, not texts. Reading a text will give you some ground for belief; it will not, by itself, actually give you knowledge. Still, we can speak loosely and say that encyclopedias contain what purports to be knowledge, and that is enough for me to love encyclopedias."1

Title: Essays on Free Knowledge

Comment: As the title of this newish book indicates, this is a collection of essays. I've already read some of them but am interested in reading the remainder.

Subtitle: The Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge

Comment: I haven't written much about Wikipedia in recent years, but I've been a frequent critic of it on this weblog for over a decade. When it first began, I had some hope that it might turn out well, but was always skeptical of the approach taken to constructing it. Unfortunately, my skepticism appears to have been borne out by its subsequent development. I'll get into what's wrong with the approach later.

Author: Larry Sanger

Comment: Sanger is a philosopher and co-founder of Wikipedia, so he knows where the bodies are buried.

Summary: According to the book's table of contents, like all of Gaul, it is divided into three parts:

  1. The history and theory of Wikipedia

    These are the questions that Sanger addresses in this part:

    What makes an open, online collaboration succeed? … Should media, textbooks, and above all reference works aim to be neutral―or should they instead aim at what their editors claim is the objective truth? How should we organize people who are difficult to reconcile, who have different interests and agendas? How do we resolve disputes among anonymous people in open communities?2

    Comment: I don't know the answers to any of these questions except the second: assuming that "neutrality" is not just another name for "objectivity", I think that reference works at least should aim for the truth. As far as I'm concerned, all truth is objective; the phrase "subjective truth" is just a fancy way of referring to an opinion or mere belief.

    The first essay in this section and, thus, in the book, is one that I've already read: "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". This essay was written and published in 2005, when Wikipedia was still young, and its tone is more positive than Sanger's more recent writings. Perhaps this is because he was still too close to it to view it objectively, or time has not been kind to it. In a footnote to this essay added to the book, he writes: "By 2019, I had come to the view that Wikipedia is simply 'broken'"3. That doesn't say whether it took until two years ago for Sanger to realize that it was "broken", or that it wasn't broken until then.

    I don't think that its early history is important to understanding what's "broken" about Wikipedia, nor does it show us how to fix it. It shows how we got here, but it doesn't show how to get out of here. For that reason, unless you're specifically interested in its history, I would suggest skipping over this essay, which is not to say that this detailed account isn't interesting.

    The last essay in this section, "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism" is another that I've already read. It deals with the issue that I'm most interested, namely, expertise. Many of Wikipedia's supporters seem to believe that you don't need experts to produce an encyclopedia: that if you get enough ignoramuses together, they will produce knowledge. This sounds rather like the old probability theory chestnut that if you get enough monkeys typing away, eventually they'll produce the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That's a sarcastic way of putting it, but the question is serious: how do you get knowledge out of ignorance?

  2. The politics of internet knowledge

    In an age of instant answers from collectively-built databases, should we care about accumulating individual knowledge, or are mere information and collective knowledge good enough? What sort of special role, if any, do experts deserve in declaring "what we all know"? Is individual knowledge, built from books and individual study, somehow outmoded?4

    Comment: To address the last question first: I don't see how "collective knowledge" can be constructed without individual knowledge from which to construct it. By an "expert", all I mean is a knowledgeable person, and not necessarily someone with a particular degree. If you know every Pokémon character and its abilities, then you're a Pokémon expert.

    The answer to the last question answers the first. As for the second, I'm not sure what it's asking.

  3. Freer knowledge
    In the final part I include three recent essays bemoaning the fact that free knowledge is in dire straits, now that, like social media, Wikipedia has abandoned neutrality and is used as a tool for social manipulation. … I conclude, in a brand new essay, that free information and knowledge on the Internet is under attack, and I ask how we can save it.5

    Comment: Apparently, this section is at least partly promoting Sanger's new project: the Encyclosphere. I gather that the goal is to create an alternative internet encyclopedia that lacks the faults of Wikipedia. I wish the project well and would love to have a superior alternative to Wikipedia, which I would gladly use6, but I doubt it will work out. The problem is that Wikipedia has already grown so big that it's sucked all of the air out of the online encyclopedia reading room. Like such platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, there's really only room for one such entity on the internet, and for better or worse we're probably stuck with it. I hope I'm wrong about that.

General Comment: As mentioned above, I was somewhat skeptical of Wikipedia as soon as I heard of it, but was willing to give it a chance. My skepticism soon turned into criticism as I began reading it, especially in areas in which I'm an expert.

How can you test a reference work or other source of information for reliability? Choose a topic about which you are already knowledgeable, preferably to the level of expertise, then see what the source has to say about it. So, I read Wikipedia entries on logic, including those on logical fallacies. Not only were some of these entries inaccurate, some didn't even make sense. In addition, many defenders of Wikipedia claim that errors are quickly corrected, whereas some of the mistakes that I noticed persisted for years or are still present7.

Sanger seems to have followed much the same path as I took, though more slowly. However, I get the impression from his more recent essays that he's now passed me in his skepticism, though that may be because I simply haven't paid much attention recently.

Finally, some comments about Sanger's writing: he's a philosopher who doesn't write like a philosopher writing for other philosophers. So, he spends little time referring to the views of famous philosophers or citing the philosophical literature in a way designed to impress other philosophers. This is not to say that his views on knowledge and expertise have been dumbed down, but that he writes about these topics so clearly that I think any intelligent person will be able to understand him.

Publication Date: 2020

Comment: This book is from last year, obviously, but I only found out about it this year.

The Blurbs: There are few blurbs for this book, and those it has are mainly descriptive of who Sanger is.

Disclosure & Disclaimer: I've never met Sanger in the flesh, but belonged to an email discussion list on systematic philosophy he ran back in the '90s. This is a newish book and I haven't read it yet, so can't review or recommend it, but its topic interests me and may also interest Fallacy Files readers.

Notes:

  1. P. ix; all page number citations are to the new book.
  2. P. x.
  3. P. 6.
  4. Pp. x-xi.
  5. P. xi.
  6. I use the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and only fall back on Wikipedia for information on popular culture that Britannica doesn't cover, and for which accuracy is not so important.
  7. As an example of an entry that contains novice errors, see: Wikipedia Watch, 10/22/2008. Interestingly, the "Talk" page for the Wikipedia entry discussed contains a good explanation of some of what's wrong with it, but the entry is still uncorrected after over a dozen years.
Puzzle
July 4th, 2021 (Permalink)

A Second Meeting of the New Logicians' Club

On this Independence Day, when you're through marching in a parade, eating hot dogs, and watching fireworks, here's a puzzle you can while away some of your free time on.

After attending my first meeting of the New Logicians' Club as a guest1, I decided to join. On the night of my first meeting as a member, the club was again playing the truth-tellers and liars game, which was the game where every member of the club was randomly assigned the role of either a truth-teller or a liar and required to answer every direct question accordingly.

Unfortunately, I arrived late for the meeting and, as a result, all the other members had already received their assignments as either truth-tellers or liars for the evening, so I didn't know who was what. Thankfully, I was assigned the role of truth-teller, and everything I tell you about that evening is true2.

The dinner had already started when I arrived and was seated at a round table with four other members of the club. I asked the member seated directly across from me―whose name was Arnauld, according to a tag on his lapel―whether he was a truth-teller or liar for the evening. He mumbled something inaudible to me because his mouth was full of food. Turning to the member seated next to him, whose name was apparently Bolzano, I asked what Arnauld had said.

"Arnauld said that he's not a liar", Bolzano replied. The member sitting next to me, whose name was Church, whispered to me: "But Arnauld was lying."

The fourth member at my table, named De Morgan, added: "Arnauld and Church are either both truth-tellers or both liars."

Finally, Arnauld swallowed his food and was able to speak audibly: "That's not true!" he blurted, glaring across the table at De Morgan.

How confusing! Can you help me determine which logicians were truth-tellers and which liars?

Extra Credit: What were the first names of those four logicians?

Notes:

  1. For the first meeting of the club, see: A Meeting of the New Logicians' Club, 5/30/2021
  2. Of course, if I were a liar, I would say the same thing!
July 2nd, 2021 (Permalink)

Perpetrate or Perpetuate

Spell-checking programs are useful against some types of misspelling, but they won't catch everything. Nonetheless, a good one will catch most common misspellings, thus freeing you up to look for the rare ones. In particular, they won't catch a misspelling that just happens to spell a different word than that intended. For example, the word "led", which is the past tense of the verb "to lead", is often misspelled as "lead"1. Also, "parity" and "parody" are occasionally confused, and a spell checker probably won't notice2.

The words "perpetrate" and "perpetuate" are so similar in spelling, differing by only one letter, that they are difficult to distinguish at a glance. However, their meaning is very different: "to perpetrate" means to commit a crime, or some other bad action3. In contrast, "to perpetuate", means to make something perpetual, that is, to cause it to continue indefinitely4. Since both words are transitive verbs, it's unlikely that even a program that checks grammar will prevent you from confusing them. Given that both words are uncommon, you would expect that confusing them would be even less common, but it's common enough to have been warned against in at least two usage books5.

A little over a year ago, I noticed the following sentence in a professionally published book6: "One can even book a cabin on the annual Conspira-Sea Cruise, which allows passengers to not only heal from all of the conspiracies that have been perpetuated upon them but also watch for alien visitors in the night sky.7" The supposed conspiracies were allegedly perpetrated on the passengers, not perpetuated.

Recently, I came across the following confusing sentence in another book from a different professional publisher: "Guys like Omar helped bring fresh clean skins into the jihadi ranks and inspired those at home who were unable to get to places like Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, or Pakistan but were willing and able to perpetuate violence locally.8" With "perpetrate" substituted for "perpetuate", it's less confusing.

Please don't perpetuate the perpetration of this peccadillo.

Update, 7/19/2021: I was just doing some research on the Tamara Rand hoax of 1981 when I came across the following sentence in a statement by a television host who participated in it: "I have perpetuated a hoax on the public and feel very much ashamed.9" The hoax was perpetrated, not perpetuated, since it was quickly exposed. It's surprising to come across another example of this seemingly rare mistake in a little more than two weeks after writing the above entry. Also, in all three of these examples the mistake is in the same direction, namely, substituting the incorrect "perpetuate" for "perpetrate".

Notes:

  1. See: Get the "Lead" Out, 2/5/2007.
  2. Parity or Parody, 3/18/2021.
  3. "Perpetrate", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 7/1/2021.
  4. "Perpetuate", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 7/1/2021.
  5. See:
    • Bill Bryson, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting it Right (2002)
    • Harry Shaw, Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions (Revised Edition, 1987)
  6. Conspiracy Theories: A Complete-Enough Picture, 6/17/2020.
  7. Joseph E. Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories: A Primer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), p. 5.
  8. Clint Watts, Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News (Harper, 2018), p. 4; emphasis added.
  9. Myram Borders, "Hollywood psychic Tamara Rand's prediction of the attempted assassination…", United Press International, 4/5/1981.

Previous Entry

Looking for a cheap research paper? CopyCrafter.net offers high-quality service with 24/7 support.

Superb online gambling Australia at Casinonic! Register and claim bonuses now!

If you're looking for an extensive review of the best sports betting games in the Philippines today, check out 22betphilippines.com.ph complete with thorough game reviews, attractive bonus offers, and responsive customer support.

Get the top-notch online casino entertainment available in the Philippines when you visit onlinegambling.com.ph

Online cricket betting is the most played sports betting game in India. If you want to play and win awesome offers on cricket games just check out topcricketbetting.in.

Read and write reviews of Casino Gods at TheCasinoDB.

A great German Casino for new players.