All Thoughts Being Equal

Recently the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization, classified processed meat as a known carcinogen and red meat as a probable one. Some people took it as a strong argument against meat. Industry PR called it "dramatic and alarmist overreach." I think this is an example of how poor science reporting, from the original press release to mainstream and secondary follow-ups, plus public innumeracy, can lead to over-political science news. I. Let's start at the source: What did the IARC 's press release [ pdf ] actually say? After thoroughly reviewing the accumulated scientific literature, a Working Group of 22 experts from 10 countries convened by the IARC Monographs Programme classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on limited evidence that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and strong mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic ef...

I.   My friend Jon Bash is a very talented musician/composer , so it's safe to assume that he thinks very seriously about music in general. Recently he posted this article ( "How Popular Music's Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy" ) from a site called The Anti-Media, about a study examining the "reading level" of Billboard Top 40 songs. Stories about the study were passed around other places too, including The Guardian ( "Hip hop ain't top: new study reveals reading levels behind music lyrics" ) and The Onion 's A.V. Club ( "Popular songs are dumb and only getting dumber, says dumb study" ), with varying levels of skepticism and/or snark. Before getting in to any substantive discussion, however, I will first make fun of The Anti-Media for writing a really dumb article. Claire Bernish (Twitter handle: @ subversive_pen — Twitter bio: a Julian Assange quote) opens her turd-de-force with the following incredible paragraph-and...

This post is a follow-up to AS Elections 2015: Why Do We Even Bother , and a partial follow-up to Western Washington University: "diversity" = "anti-white"? , AS Presidential Debates: Shit Gets Real , and Inappropriate I. When 6 out of 7 positions on the WWU Associated Students board are uncontested in the 2015 elections , and only 7% of students voted in the 2014 elections , that's an embarrassment and the AS should feel bad. If only this hasn't been a recurring theme, with the same problems and platitudes traded back and forth, for—at the very least— fifteen years ... But that was the last post. Now we're in case-study mode. This past academic year, what did the AS Board, they of the 7% voter turnout, actually do with their newfound powers? Let's start with what they wanted to do, as documented by this strangely titled AS Pravda Review (yes I will make that joke again) article, "What Have the AS Board Been Up To?" Given th...

Note: This post was adapted from a Facebook comment I made in a closed group. In the March 2011 edition of their National Health Statistics Report , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published results on sexual identity from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth. More recently (July 2014 edition of the NHSR) they published the results of the 2013 National Health Interview Survey[1]. This got passed around with headlines like "Gay population smaller than previously thought." According to the report, Proper counter-propaganda tactics would be to pull out other statistical nuggets for comparison. As a particularly evocative example, only 1.7% of the American population self-identifies as Mormon [1] , so they're outnumbered 2 to 1 even with this maybe-lowball stat. Similarly, the Southern Baptist churches claim roughly 16 million members, which is about 5% of the U.S. population [2] ... not all that much bigger than the LGBTQ population...