Tyler Vigen

Please leave your anti-science anti-intellectual comments outside of hacker news.

"FED was instrumental in making USD the most stable currency in the last 100 years" - baseless argument. comparing fiat money to fiat money says nothing about efficacy of fiat money.

"Too bad when California deregulated their energy market..." - http://www.tylervigen.com/ Furthermore, where does this money appear from? If the government makes energy cheaper by paying for it by taxing you more, you are just lying to yourself.

"anti-abortion" - please explain why third-trimester abortions should be allowed. the baby can live by being born at that point, and the mother has had plenty of time to deal with the issue. but sure, you can disagree with that, and I won't debate it here.

"anti same-sex marriage" - "I think the way to fix DOMA is maybe to try to make all of our laws more neutral towards the issue [of same sex marriage], and I don't want the government promoting something I don't believe in.", Rand Paul

"vaccination" - http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-rand-paul-vaccine-20150212-story.html

So hey, maybe you disagree with some of his positions after you found out what they actually are. Is that enough to say, you shouldn't care at all about privacy, the military industrial complex, foreign entanglements that make us less safe, more drones strikes on civilians, and a corrupt, racist criminal justice system? I recommend becoming informed and making a rational…

We all know that one can make statements that while factually correct, can be misleading, distorting, or unsound in some other way. (e.g. The statement "the divorce rate is highly correlated to the per capita consumption of margarine" is factually true [1] - but left on its own might leave people with the impression one has to do with the other)

[1] http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

The same is true here - leaving out the context that FedEx has spent ~$50b on capex in the past 10 years and recognized $8.2b of income tax expense in the same 10 year period (which is not all US fedral, and might not have been the amount remitted over that period) changes the tone of the story. Additionally, really all that is happening is that tax collections go down a bunch in one year and up for the following six years, the only gain is on time value of money)

That is an excerpt from a book about using psychology for the purposes of persuasion in marketing. It was not a study on the memetic effects of suicide reporting, which aspects of the reporting might contribute to contagion, or a treatise on untreated depression or suicide.

I read that PDF. Twice. It makes some ... great leaps of conclusion and assumption, without much in the way of investigation or data. It concludes for example that young people intentionally fatally drove their cars into trees because they read articles about suicide, but it presents no actual evidence for that case other than a statistical correlation.

As is mentioned frequently on HN, correlation in statistics is tricky: http://tylervigen.com/

I don't think we have enough information at hand to suppress discussion of depression or suicide.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

It is best to assume "everything is correlated with everything else", rather than jump on every correlation. On the other hand it is important to encourage people to notice correlations and coincidences, but realize not every one can be followed up on, and most of these that are noticed will be only weakly involved in any solution.

Really all we know at this point is that Alzheimer's disease is associated with the presence of more stuff that stains with antibodies raised towards Amyloid-beta aggregates than usual. It isn't even clear whether these are a cause or a symptom, nor whether these stains are near 100% specific towards beta-Amyloid (ie as derived from Amyloid precursor protein) rather than other aggregations of beta-sheets (like any prion "infection").

A well-known refrain, I know, but correlation does not imply causation[0].

Spurious Correlations[1] has been posted here many times[2], but a few representative examples may be worth sharing just the same:

Per capita cheese consumption correlates with Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets

Total revenue generated by arcades correlates with Computer science doctorates awarded in the US

Japanese passenger cars sold in the US correlates with Suicides by crashing of motor vehicle

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

[1] https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=spurious%20correlations&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story

Don’t forget this awesome quote: “However, a recent paper (Samsel & Seneff, 2013), argued that glyphosate may be a key contributor to the obesity epidemic and the autism epidemic in the United States, as well as to several other diseases and conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, infertility, depression, and cancer.”

It’s causing all the bad things? That would be amazing if true, unfortunately it sounds unlikely (chiropractic comes to mind) and the rest of the science world doesn’t believe these authors.

If the graphs in the paper seem compelling, make sure to spend some time here: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations