Sort of an entertaining read. The cornerstone of the argument starts on page 55 - three purported statistical anomalies that appear to be well-known and debunked.
* One person sees 1 of 4 images and another far away guesses the image. Supposedly it's accurate ~33% of the time instead of 25%. Fun but it can't be replicated by anyone else. Selection bias, poor design, and bad meta analysis explain the difference.
* ~54% of the, a person can detect if they're being stared at, whereas we'd expect 50%. Again, cannot be replicated in better designed studies and bad study design and selection bias explain the other results.
* By a small but supposedly statistically improbably amount, people can get a dice to roll by "wishing" for it. Again, cannot be replicated and can be explained with p-hacking anyhow.
You could still still see a greater left-side incidence if arm melanomas were higher on the left arm even though trunk/hip thigh melanomas were evenly distributed.
The blog fails to answer the most basic question: do right-side sleepers with a metal bedframe aligned with a radio tower have a higher incidence of left-side cancers that can explain the general population discrepancy?
Agreed. I'm an extremely fit runner doing 50+ miles a week and almost all of my runs are in a super easy zone that is equivalent to an uphill walk for most people. A lot of this has to due with well developed biomechanics, but also superior vo2max.
Most health focused runners should be walking at an incline or running downhill except for 1-2 high intensity interval days. There are huge benefits to low intensity activity and higher doses are almost always better. The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
(Of course, if the goal is to be a runner and not simply be healthy, you'll need to push your body to a point where running is like walking but it takes a long time to do correctly.)
> The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
Totally, I agree, in that the reason they're intense because they're using the wrong energy system.
My half baked theory is that the reason people (like me) don't like running at all is because the our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind to not like it because it's so inefficient and a waste. If, however, we trained our bodies and mitochondria to use more fat for energy aerobic-style, we'd like running a ton more. I'm betting that'll be the case with me.
If we give substance X to 17 people and 100% of them die, I would recommend against taking substance X.
Of course, it's not as black and white here, but sample size and effect size should be considered in relation to each other. Previous research and theoretical expectations should also play a leading role.
In this case, previous research and theoretical expectations would indicate only a small effect, if any. This is covered in the introduction to the paper, which I'm sure you have read.
Nursing only requires a 2 year degree in the US and hardly any ongoing training apart from paid training provided by the hospital. There might be some additional certifications for certain fields, but that's it.
Most nurses are paid hourly, so the "long hours" is a moot point.
My nurse friends all make around 100,000 per year after overtime, which they're eager to get. The average full time salary without overtime is ~80,000.
For a 2 year degree, this is very decent money in most states and I think we'd struggle to name a career with such low education requirements and high salary.
I really appreciate the work of medical professionals and don't want to belittle their work. But I think nursing does standout as a counterexample to the point you're making.
It also requires passing a licensing test. Passing the licensing test requires self-study. You need to include this time in the training requirements for the profession.
Most jobs do not require a licensing test. So when comparing you need to find similar jobs with 2 year degree + licensing requirements.
> The average full time salary without overtime is ~80,000.
That's exaggerated. The median pay is $77,600. Or a better measure is the $37.31 per hour. That is not a high hourly rate by any measure. [1]
> I think we'd struggle to name a career with such low education requirements and high salary.
No we wouldn't. Large numbers of programmers don't even have a degree - it's not required for sure - and earn way more than nurses. Licensing is not required. Mandatory overtime is not rampant. Programming being a male dominated field.
> Most nurses are paid hourly, so the "long hours" is a moot point.
It's not moot at all. In many cases it is a job requirement, not optional. NY for example only passed a law in 2009 making mandatory overtime illegal for nurses. It was so rampant that states have passed laws about it. That makes the career far harder than most jobs where overtime is often optional. And to date, only 18 states have laws against mandatory overtime for nurses.
> Neither of your links mention nursing.
That's wrong. The 1st link shows a chart with a comparison of careers with similar training and the chart shows nursing in that comparison.
This source shows the IQ range of nurses and computer programmers as very similar. With programmers going both slightly lower and slightly higher than nurses. Meaning there are no nurses that have as low an IQ as the lowest IQ programmer. Proving your claim definitely wrong.
The jobs require different types of cognitive ability and I'd guess the average programmer would fail miserably at being a nurse due to not having the right type of cognitive ability.
I'm pretty skeptical - that's 30 year old data and I doubt the programmer category corresponds closely with the profession today.
What kind of intellectual capacity would the average programmer lack compared to an RN? Physical/energy/personality demands I could see being a barrier, but not cognition.
Feel free to provide an better source. You made a claim that looked like a bad guess and it was pretty easy to find a source showing that you were wrong. What data is your claim based on?
> What kind of intellectual capacity would the average programmer lack compared to an RN?
The ability to pick up on social queues for example. The cognitive ability to recognize when logic isn't appropriate and empathy is more appropriate. The cognitive ability to read between the lines about what someone is really saying about what they need instead of taking their requirements literally. Software developers are nearly four times more likely to have autism than the general population. So you could start there. To be clear, I'm not saying all programmers or even the majority of programmers are bad at all of the above. But claiming that it's all raw IQ and there is no difference in cognitive skills between jobs is disingenuous. I certainly don't want a math genius with poor proprioception as my nurse.
> that's 30 year old data and I doubt the programmer category corresponds closely with the profession today.
As someone who has been programming for more than 30 years, I can assure you that you are wrong about that guess. In fact there are so many more programmers today and the demand is so high, that it would be a far safer bet that the low end of the IQ range is lower today. At bigger companies especially, some programmers barely contribute and still manage to keep their job for years.
I admit, I didn't read all 92 pages of that doc, I just skimmed to the chart at the bottom. I guess you are using "computer occ" value for programmer? If so, there's a lot more interesting things in there than what you pointed out. For example, the lowest scoring "computer occs" on chart 7 are way below that of "administrative occs", as well as high school teachers, service managers, social workers and clergy. Hard to tell, but looks like clerical-other also has higher minimal requirements. Am I missing the real data or misunderstanding that chart? Because frankly, it looks pretty implausible.
The average programmer fails miserably at being a programmer. Most of the value in the industry is generated at the top.
I'd guess the average nurse is pretty good at their job. I've only been in a hospital once so tiny sample size, but everyone looking after me there was great. I can't imagine it's an industry with boatloads of cash floating around that lets people cruise by with mediocrity.
I think there are salary differences across careers for a variety of complex market reasons. If I had understood the degree to which money would dictate the security of my family, I'd have spent my years as a lowly paid graduate student and post-doc becoming a surgeon or working in finance instead of becoming a mathematician. My bay area salary is much better than my tenure track salary but still a fraction of what I could actually be making. Nurses, too, are free to retrain.
I will concede that this issue is not personally important to me.
The claim is that compared to jobs with similar training requirements and similar job demands.
Comparing to all occupations is a useless comparison if you want to stay on topic. There should be no need to repeat the entire context of the conversation. That's your responsibility as the reader.
It’s more than a bubble. The ideology you are arguing against is so elemental to those who hold it that, to have any distance from it, they would first have to process a full-blown existential crisis.
> "The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed."
I think you're either paraphrasing deceptively, or you are being intellectually lazy. Perhaps it is better to not assume malice...
The rest of the quote is:
"In total, 144 participants received an mRNA vaccination between the baseline and the follow-up scan. We performed separate analyses for participants with vaccination as well as for participants without vaccination. The results were not different from the findings of the full cohort as presented. The cardiac effects of vaccination require further research."
This is a remarkably stupid comment but not everything is "unreasonably effective". Mathematics was noted as unreasonably effective for modeling the universe because most areas of mathematics were not invented for the applications they meet... like discovering that your coffee maker doubles as an exceptionally good waffle maker.
Makefiles on the other hand, are not unreasonably effective in this sense. Makefiles are, in fact, _reasonably_ effective... like a coffee maker that brews coffee well.
It's a pretty bland memo and a thinly veiled advertisement for AWS.