I’ve been lately refreshing myself on statistical analysis by reading. While it’s good to have a modest understanding of statistical formulas, these days the important thing to know is which functions you need to call. All those scary looking square roots, normal distribution and t-tables need not scare you when modern computers can calculate all of those things in a blink of the eye.
The debate over how best to approach people who identify as transgender or non-binary is many-layered and can be complex. Medical questions about the evidence for the safety and efficacy of specific interventions, and the ethics of treating minors, deserve thoughtful and open discussion. The optimal way to incorporate transgender athletes into competition also could benefit from a good faith debate. Unfortunately, discussion around transgender issues suffers from at least two sources.
First, it has been coopted as part of a politically-motivated culture war. This reality is exactly the opposite of thoughtful good-faith discussion. Second, for most people wrapping their head around a reality that may not conform to traditional notions of strictly binary sex and gender takes a lot or processing. Misconceptions about the basic science are rampant, and are, in fact, encouraged by the culture warriors.
In the summer of 1957, Ronald Fisher, one of the fathers of modern statistics, sat down to write a strongly worded letter in defense of tobacco.
The letter was addressed to the British Medical Journal, which, just a few weeks earlier, had taken the editorial position that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. According to the journal’s editorial board, the time for amassing evidence and analyzing data was over. Now, they wrote, “all the modern devices of publicity” should be used to inform the public about the perils of tobacco.
According to Fisher, this was nothing short of statistically illiterate fear mongering. Surely the danger posed to the smoking masses was “not the mild and soothing weed,” he wrote, “but the organized creation of states of frantic alarm.”
Fisher was a well-known hothead (and an inveterate pipe smoker), but the letter and the resulting debate, which lasted until his death in 1962, was taken as a serious critique by the scientific community. After all, Ronald A. Fisher had spent much of his career devising ways to mathematically evaluate causal claims—claims exactly like the one that the British Medical Journal was making about smoking and cancer. Along the way, he had revolutionized the way that biological scientists conduct experiments and analyze data.
And yet we know how this debate ends. On one of the most significant public health questions of the 20th century, Fisher got it wrong.
Why eat lead paint chips when you can get COVID-19?
"Severe COVID-19 infection results in cognitive impairment similar to that sustained by natural aging between the ages of 50 to 70, and is equivalent to losing 10 IQ points."
This past February, Lunz Trujillo published work that shows this kind of anti-science attitude is associated with having a rural identity. And this identity is held not only by people who live in rural areas, but also by people who strongly identify as rural, regardless of where they currently live.
“It’s more how people think of themselves versus where they are,” Lunz Trujillo said. She cited the political scientist Katherine J. Cramer’s well-known work on rural resentment, which illustrated that many rural people disdained anything perceived to be urban — racial and ethnic minorities, liberals, the LGBTQ community, cultural elites — and tied it to their rejection of intellectuals and intellectualism as well.
The key insight to all this work is that those who distrust vaccines, science and expertise aren’t doing so necessarily because they have a knowledge gap or a misunderstanding. Distrusting experts is part of their identity. Motta and his colleagues’ work suggests that being anti-vaccine has become an identity, too. In some respects, distrusting experts has become a political choice, which means that any message from an official source — whether it’s a researcher, head of a government agency or a journalist — is more likely to inspire the opposite of its intended reaction from those who view that source as part of the political opposition.
These trends might be spreading to include some experts themselves. Motta released a paper earlier this month that shows about 10 percent of primary care physicians were uncertain about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, despite abundant evidence that they have been extremely safe and effective. The vaccine-hesitant doctors shared many of the same characteristics as other vaccine skeptics: They were more likely to be rural and conservative. For rural areas especially, this data suggests a vicious feedback loop. People who were suspicious of the vaccines had doctors who were suspicious, too.
In a human living in the 21st-century industrialized world, there’s a good chance that microplastics are pumping around in your veins if this small first-of-its-kind study is anything to go by.
Reporting in the journal Environment International, scientists from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam developed a method to accurately measure concentrations of microplastics in human blood for the first time.