The paraphrased conversation in this article reinforces the posts here that say our ability to be swayed by fear and tribalism is much higher than thought possible, especially those of the highly educated zoom class.
The irregular handling of statistics induces a state of conspiratorial cynicism about media coverage of any scientific question. Sometimes there will be 10 published papers containing observational studies, and the media line will be "wait on RCT data before we even start to pretend we know anything about this". Other times you'll see a single model being treated as though it was brought down the mountain by Moses.
The ambiguity of uncertainty in mean values has become a playground for confirmation bias and the crafting of opportunistic narratives.
The paraphrased conversation in this article reinforces the posts here that say our ability to be swayed by fear and tribalism is much higher than thought possible, especially those of the highly educated zoom class.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-reality-they-invent-to-feed-the-power-they-crave/
The irregular handling of statistics induces a state of conspiratorial cynicism about media coverage of any scientific question. Sometimes there will be 10 published papers containing observational studies, and the media line will be "wait on RCT data before we even start to pretend we know anything about this". Other times you'll see a single model being treated as though it was brought down the mountain by Moses.
The ambiguity of uncertainty in mean values has become a playground for confirmation bias and the crafting of opportunistic narratives.