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Statistics is fun.
Ah yes the famously sparsely populated capital city of London, and the entirety of Scotland.
areas that thrive on multiculturalism voted remain, so its the opposite - sparse areas are more likely to vote leave and be on the map. Scotland also usually votes differently to England. And for the BSE outbreak, it was 178 cases over 2 years, some of which took victims 15 years to die - a map is a very bad way to showcase that data. Dots on the map may work with a number for year of contraction and another for death.
I never realized Scotland was so densely populated.
The punchline being in the slide, underneath the maps, clearly indicates that this is a joke. I would therefore suggest that anyone who takes this seriously should double-check both datasets first. ARE those the actual mad cow disease outbreak areas?
Last time this came up, I did a little sleuthing. I don’t have the link, so you’ll have to assume I’m not lying, but IIRC the right image is authentic and from the BBC or a similar outlet, whereas the left image is just a grade-adjusted version of the right image. The titles are both added in post.
These things do happen, it’s called spurious correlation if i understand correctly. Saw a great video once with a bunch of examples. Wanted to share it with y’all but can’t find it unfortunately.
Here is a website that finds them at random:
I recently read a book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser, and by the end I was thinking she was making exactly this kind of error. Her thesis is that - in simple/broad terms - pollution, particularly lead-based pollution, was the reason we saw such a huge spike in serial killers during the period of the '60s to the ‘80s. She looked at serial killers’ lives, where they grew up, and in the cases she focused on (I would assume the much larger cohort of such killers she didn’t mention simply didn’t grow up near lead-farting factories and so didn’t fit the thesis) she was able to find that they were likely exposed to these pollutants during their development. She doesn’t explain, or even mention, how the proven psychological effects of such pollution (uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts) could translate into the highly specific and often extremely meticulous and well-planned modus operandi typical of serial killing. She lists the symptoms of the kind of lead toxicity that affects people, which are all things like anger, delusions, depression, personality changes, etc., but never shows an example of such a person being a serial killer. They might well kill someone, but it’ll be in a fit of rage or the grips of a delusion, and they’ll be caught immediately because they don’t have the wherewithal to plan or cover up the killing, because they’re fucking brain damaged.
She doesn’t mention that serial killing as a concept is relatively recent, and that our detection of serial killings has therefore improved immeasurably over the decades, leading to more identifications of them during the Ted Bundy era (kinda the same thing as “there was no autism when I was a kid, but now everyone has it, must be all the vaccines”). And the final straw for me was when she tried to link the existence of the Bloods and the Crips gangs to the same kind of pollution 🤦 She makes it seem that there’s no violence possible in human nature without toxic chemicals damaging people’s brains first.
Would have been a much more useful and interesting book without the serial killers even being mentioned, to be honest. The criminality of factory owners she discusses, and their knowing disregard for the lives and safety of their workers and local citizens, is grotesque enough on its own, arguably worse - or at least as bad as - Ted Bundy’s crimes. And they’re crimes far less discussed than those of someone like Bundy. Oh well.
Are we certain about that spurious part? I don’t know if anything similar was ever studied or shown about Mad Cow Disease, but research keeps coming out showing that Covid caused long term changes inside many folks brains.
Maybe the reason we’re seeing so many billionaires and politicians now openly ranting about evil and stupid things that seem completely detached from reality is that they’re simply the people with the most spotlight on them or who can most easily have their words repeated in the news and spread online… and we’re all getting more stupider. Just like that time half of us went to Jupiter. :/
Thank God we’re going to Mars
not sure where I read it, but it made me see history as something amazing.
I think it was in response to some 2000s election, and comparing the results with earth’s geological history.
how an ancient river delta millions of years ago created a fertile crescent in the US south, which was the cultivated using slaves, which brought in a huge slave population, and that area is still overrepresented by the black vote. changing the elections outcome.
The idea that a river from eons ago is visible in political poll maps is fascinating. Everything is connected.
It’s an ancient seashore, and it can be seen in every presidential election map stretching across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. The contrast seems most prominent in Alabama.
yhea, I wish I kept that tab open, but it was like 2008 :(
It went into detail how everything is connected.
Does it match rural vs urban areas?
Scotland is largely rural, and yet…
Scotland interprets the word “brexit” differently. One day they will do the real brexit
I hope Scotland joins the EU one day!
Surely the association comes from some other higher metric (area of feeding pasture)
