Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Science

  • Labour did not Lose Because of Remain Seats

    Some commentators on Twitter and in the media are saying that Labour lost the 2019 General Election because it lost too many votes to remain parties, and that failure to retain support from remainers was the problem. Angry Labour activists on Twitter have been listing off the remain seats that were lost, and saying that…

  • The Labour 2019 Election Loss was Driven by Brexit: Statistical Analysis of Election Results

    The UK General Election has just finished, with Labour losing badly to Boris Johnson’s Brexit-fetishizing Tories. The media are describing Labour’s loss as the worst since 1935, which is true if you look at seats lost but not at the vote – with 32.2% of the vote share it’s the best result for a losing…

  • My Experience of Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome

    In April 2018 I was struck by Ramsay-Hunt syndrome, and half my face was paralyzed. For about two months I had to somehow struggle through a new job with my face sliding off and my entire body completely exhausted and stricken with pain. I recovered over the following year until my face was about (in…

  • Gender Critical Feminist Praxis Harasses Natal Women: An Application of Bayes’ Rule to Bathroom Exclusion

    No doubt many of my readers are aware that there is a stream of feminism, which calls itself “gender critical”, that rejects the idea that transgender women are women and aims to “protect” cis women from having these women in women-only spaces. In the 1970s and 1990s this manifested as an internecine feminist turf war…

  • Did Polling Companies Get the 2019 Australian Federal Election Wrong?

    On 18th May 2019 Australia held a federal election, and the ruling Liberal/National Party (LNP) Coalition scored a victory over the Australian Labor Party (ALP) that was billed by most observers as an “upset” because opinion polls had in general been predicting a narrow ALP victory. The opinion polls predicted that the ALP would get…

  • The Latest Sokal Hoax

    And let me tell you something Before you go taking a walk in my world, …you better take a look at the real world Cause this ain’t no Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Can you say “feel like shit?” Yea maybe sometimes I do feel like shit I ain’t happy about it, but I’d rather feel like…

  • Is it True That No Level of Alcohol is Safe? A Critical Assessment of a Recent GBD Study

    There has been some fuss in the media recently about a new study showing no level of alcohol use is safe. It received a lot of media attention (for example here), reversed a generally held belief that moderate consumption of alcohol improves health (this is even enshrined in the Greek food pyramid, which has a…

  • Vague on Obesity and the Causes of Obesity

    Today’s Guardian has a column by George Monbiot discussing the issue of obesity in modern England, that I think fundamentally misunderstands the causes of obesity and paints a dangerously rosy picture of Britain’s dietary situation. The column was spurred by a picture of a Brighton Beach in 1976, in which everyone was thin, and a…

  • Asperger and the Nazis

    The journal Molecular Autism this week published an article about the links between Hans Asperger and the Nazis in world war 2 Vienna, Austria. Hans Asperger is the paediatric pscyhiatrist on whose work Asperger’s syndrome is based, and after whom the syndrome is known. Until recently Asperger was believed to have been an anti-Nazi, someone…

  • The Problem is not Facebook, it’s You

    The media this week are exploding with news that a company called Cambridge Analytica used shadily-obtained Facebook data to influence the US elections. The data was harvested by some other shady company using an app that legally exploited Facebook’s privacy rules at the time, and then handed over to Cambridge Analytica, who then used the…