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Gbill7's avatar

When I was an undergrad, I had an internship at a Federal Agency. My summer task was to look at certain data and detect trends. I brought to my boss the data that showed there were two deaths out of 100,000 in one year, and the next year there were three deaths out of 100,000. So, even if you’ve never had a course In statistics, you can see that there was no ‘statistically significant’ increase, right? But my boss exclaimed, “Great! That’s a 50% increase - we can get funding to study that!”

That sums up the ‘government mindset’ right there. Yikes.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

You don’t believe data—you test data. You're genuinely screwed the moment you decide that data is something to be used to substantiate words like believe or disbelieve.

In other words; if it's not falsifiable it is digital detritus.

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