Stuff (besides baseball) where statistics/science might be wrong?

Polls, even though I'm guilty of using them as well.

I hate it when people defend their position because a majority of people agree with them. It's like saying if a majority of people agreed with slavery, that makes it OK.

 

I don't think of science being wrong so much as incomplete. You can watch this in the field of nutrition on a regular basis -- all fats are bad...no wait some fats are good...margarine is better...no wait margarine is worse...on and on.
Every time new facts come in, they issue new findings and confuse the hell out of everybody.

I like Wayne Dyer's take on it (yes, he's a pop psych guru but he has a lot of valid insights). He says that if you limit what you believe to what science can measure, then you are constantly limited be the sophistication of your measuring instruments.

I also have found that the old wives generally knew what they were talking about.

 

Science isn't an absolute or an absolute answer. It's merely the search for the answer. It is constantly adjusting, adapting, learning, and reforming itself.

Regarding a cold, I only get sick 2 times of the year. I catch a cold once in the summer months and maaaaybe in the winter. I rarely get sick outside of that.

One of the reasons people catch colds easier in the winter is the fact they're inside more. So if one person has managed to contract the cold, they're in closer proximity to others for a longer period of time thereby increasing their risk of acquiring the disease due to proximity. I once read that the air inside your house is also dryer during winter months which dries out mucous membranes. This increases the chances of getting colds. I'm not sure about that, but hey...

It's a situation where indirectly the colder temps may be causing you to catch the cold more frequently, but is not directly the cause of your cold.

 

People can come up with statistics to prove anything, Haven. Forfty percent of all people know that.

 

Huh?

Now the common cold is a disease??? Yikes!!!

 

I lost faith in stats and polls when I heard a guy speaking at a political function about organizations that hire polling companies to give them the results they want...

Promise no argument with me??? I mean, I'm just answering the question, not entering into ANOTHER debate on this topic. Global warming...I think this fits in well with what Mrs. JB said...the information of the global climate seems so imcomplete to me that I don't think there's anyway we know what's going on there on a macro level...that was reinforced when I heard Neil Frank say exactly the same thing. Particularly given it was just about 20 years back when some of these same guys were saying, "we're about to enter the next ice age." And I'm very skeptical of man's role in this as well...I think there's a political agenda there that drives these "numbers."

haven -- i'm totally with you on the cold thing!!

 

I have read somewhere that a big reason why people seem to think that being cold gets them sick is because viruses and sickness is more easily transmitted when the outside air is cold. This kind of builds on what DoD was saying. Not sure if it is a fact, but it makes sense.

But...then again, fact shmacts. You can use facts to prove something that is even remotely true.

 

Whoa, whoa, whoa -- don't use my post as an example of why we should keep using the planet as our personal dumping ground! We may not know everything, but I don't think that precludes us from making wise decisions based on the information we do have.

Irregardless of global warming, common sense ought to tell us that spewing a contant stream of toxic emissions into the air, water and ground is eventually not going to be good for us.

 

And thus, in one brief post, you have posed the one question that baffles us all. What do we choose? Science or Faith.

The question I have been grappling with lately is whether or not it's better to experience the world through travel and contact, or to experience your imagination and hover in isolation. In general people would profoundly argue that you must experience life. And that experience is the great reward. But is it?

 

Mrs JB,

I think that the problem has been the emphasis on global warming to the exclusion of other problems. This way, people only argue about whether pollution thins the ozone and warms the planet. I agree that we cannot be certain about this particular, however, this ignores the fact that pollution creates smog and poor breathing air, that pollution can contaminate groundwater leading to disease and other health problems, etc.

I guess it was something that both sides saw as a big issue that they wanted to win and have somewhat ignored the rest (in mainstream discourse).

 

Mrs. JB -- please don't misunderstand me...i'm not saying that pollution is good...nor am i saying that it doesn't have bad effects on our living environments....

i'm simply talking about global warming...using very limited meterological information to extrapolate out over hundreds or even thousands of years. it's all done with computer models. i don't buy it.