Even though it is basically impossible to win a lottery, it actually is impossible if you don’t get a ticket. So, your chances of winning are infinitely better if you get a ticket, sounds good to me – so why do I keep losing?

Precisely!  And if you buy two lottery tickets you’ve got twice as much of a chance to win.  You go from 1 in 75 million to 2 in 75 million.  Your odds are doubled, but even doubled are virtually non-existent.

Cheers–

MRE 

1) The US has the worst infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation, and lags behind even Cuba.

rebuttal: The US includes as ‘infant mortalities’ many cases that would be classified otherwise in many other countries, and ‘at risk’ births really have a FAR better survival rate in the US than any other country in the world.

2) The Japanese eat massive quantities of rice, but have FAR lower incidence of heart attack than the US, proving that eating rice, although high carb, doesn’t cause cardio-vascular problems.

rebuttal: While the incidence of heart attack is much lower for the Japanese, the incidence of stroke is several times greater. Combining both, the statistics are about the same in both countries where a high-carb diet is the norm. The difference between heart attack and stroke is probably due to the large amount of fish and seafood in the Japanese diet.

On the second point, I thought I had seen the data in The Protein Power Lifeplan, but I flipped through it, albeit casually, over the weekend, and didn’t catch it. I’ll look again, but I may be remembering it incorrectly.

Hi Bob–

I think you’re right.  Sorry it’s taken me so long to post this comment, but somehow you got hung up in my spam filter.

Cheers–

MRE 

Hi Kaz–

I don’t know off the top of my head.  I’ll see if I can ferret it out. If I had to guess I would say around 3 for cancer.  Probably much higher if you look at overall illness including heart disease, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, etc.

Cheers–

MRE 

Hi Paul–

That’s because in their minds they are much smarter than we are and know so much better what we should do than we do.  Therefore, since they are so much smarter, they need to set the rules for the great unwashed masses of the rest of us.

Cheers–

MRE 

Hi Barbara–

Thanks for the statistic quotes.  I enjoyed them and will probably appropriate a few.

Cheers–

MRE 

The use of relative risk statistics by “big pharma” to sell their drugs is the primary reason I don’t trust physicians easily. Quite frankly, I think the use of statistics in this manner, while technically not fraud, accomplishes the same thing. There is clear intent to mislead, and influence people to make decisions they would not otherwise make. As you state 2.4 people oout of 40,000 sounds a lot less risky than 39% increase.

The anxiety and fear used by medicine to drain our pockets of our money is dispicable enough. We don’t need the facts further confused by the use of relative risk statistics applied to “risk factors” that probably aren’t true risk factors at all.

I believe it was Malcolm Kendrick that wrote about need for a “funeral rate.” I’m interested knowing the abosulte risk of any food, drug, vitamin, herb, or whatever that I introduce into my body. But I hope we don’t have to bankrupt our country before this other nonsense will stop.

Thanks for writing this piece and please do some more.

Rusty

Hi Rusty–

I definitely plan to do some more.  This one was merely teeing up the RR for use later on.  Stay tuned.

Cheers–

MRE 

Anyway, failure to include actual risk in a fearful calculation is one of the biggest problems our authoritarian society has.

The odds of an asteroid impact is almost zero. But all the NASA bureaucrats seeking bigger budgets focus upon is the consequences if one actually did occur.

Every activity or item that gets effectively banned by government regulations or lawsuits gains that status without any sane examination of the actual odds. Ten million people could do/use something, and ten die, and it might get banned, directly or through lawsuits making it too expensive to provide.

Likewise, the odds of Hussein having had WMD was almost nil, going by the intelligence available at the time, but the consequences were so scary that people accepted ridiculous lies, exaggerations, and suppositions.

The only models that claim humans are causing greenhouse-based global warming fail 100% of the time, when historic data is plugged into them. The only global increase in temperatures is of surface temperatures, which cannot be caused by the greenhouse effect, but must have some other source. So the odds of human greenhouse emissions causing global warming, based on what we know, are actually a negative number. But it’s scary…even scarier because they talk only about worst-case consequences that are guesswork…so people blindly accept, without examining the science for themselves.

Our society is hagridden by fear of consequences without the actual risk being weighed.

Or, for that matter, the cost. All of society may suffer a thousand-dollar per person burden in order to reduce the danger to 0.001% of the society. Again, only the scariness of the consequences are considered.

Our kids should be taught statistics, economics, and logic even in grade school…instead, even the three Rs have taken a back seat to good citizenship, meaningless “self esteem”, and other passivity training.

It’s no wonder they’re turning into such sheep.

Hi Kaz–

Agreed.  It’s too bad that critical thinking isn’t taught as a subject instead of simply assuming that people know how to think critically.

Cheers–

MRE 

I think most people STILL believe it’s true. When you’ve got a catchy phrase with an emotional hook and something that SOUNDS true, it’s pretty much impossible to stop the mass public from believing it…

These are the same numbers.  It goes to show how easy statistical humbug can override plain ol’ common sense.

Cheers–

MRE