Have you heard that joke about the doctors who didn't believe in vaccines, held a conference about alternative treatments and contracted COVID-19? It's not a joke:
Turns out: in stead of taking Ivermectine, not contracting the virus and claiming that's because of Ivermectine you might as well state: 'Every Sunday I walk around with a banana in my ear and I am still alive. That proves that habit works against dying.'
You see? Even smart people can make the mistake to find a correlation where there is none.
Famous example: in a certain American state there were a lot of arsons. It also happened to be a state with a large density of people of colour. People drew the conclusion that black people must be causing arsons. Makes sense, right? Wrong. Turned out that because there were a lot of people of colour, the Ku Klux Klan was very active in the region and they made a hobby out of setting houses, cars, crosses, churches and sometimes even people on fire.
People also falsely assumed - and still do - that people of colour more often than white people, are prone to committing crimes. Not true. It's mostly a matter of racial profiling.
'Yeah, but numbers don't lie!' No, but people do. And numbers are often either incomplete or simply made up.
Recently people noticed that a lot of people who are in IC with symptoms of Covid are vaccinated and 'that proves vaccins don't work!' No, it doesn't. Following the same logic one could state that seatbelts don't work because 'almost every person that got killed in a car accident was wearing a seatbelt. That proves seatbelts don't work!'
See how stupid that is?
If you still don't, let me give you another example:
'When the number of storks went down, so went the number of babies being born. That proves storks deliver babies.'
So please think carefully before you share a conclusion, based on numbers. It there really a correlation?
No comments:
Post a Comment