Almaviva

"So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era"

There are at least a couple of statistical fallacies in this conclusion. And there isn't a lack of agreement about that.

One problem with p-value tests is precisely that people misunderstand what the p-value means, which is where basic education comes in. It could save people from believing a lot of things they shouldn't. (Like many health and fitness crazes over the last generation, for instance) Or at the very least, we could train science journalists.

I played a game of Monopoly where I started with a roll of 12. There was a 97% chance I correctly rejected the hypothesis that the dice were fair. Maybe this is true in some sense? But it's still somewhere between misleading and nonsensical to say.

The 0.5% quote is fine. It's turning it into a 99.5% that is not fine.

It's essentially like saying that a pair of dice that rolled a 12 has a 97% chance of being loaded, because there's only a 1 in 36 chance of rolling that high.

"The calculations put chance of the piracy having occured due to natural variability at 0.5%. “So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era,” said Best."

We need to train children in school to understand what statistical confidence means, so that we stop saying wrong things like this.

> Also, is js really even the best tool for this?

For visualizing the Mandelbrot set? No. For writing an article on the web about incrementally building it up? Yes.

Presumably "Machine Language" which is what we called Assembly, back when the translation between what you wrote and what the CPU actually did was pretty transparent.

Lots of people visit links on the clear web showing illegal and horrific acts. If the full extent of a crime is filling out an http form with a fake email to see some pictures and video, it's still not clear that this is so far beyond the pale that years of prison for hundreds of thousands of people is the best solution.

If the site mentioned in the article had 150,000 members as they say, that's a lot of people to lock up for years for pointing a browser at a url.

The problem is fundamental and serious, what to do when a growing number of people have literally nothing valuable to contribute to an economy. But horses aren't a good analogy to shed light on it.

Horses are more analogous to steam engines than people, in their historical function on the economy.

Horses haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that humans have.

> you cannot pick this up in any meaningful way in a "few months" of after hours/weekend study

You can't pick up coding like this either. See Peter Norvig's famous "Teach yourself programming in 10 years" article. The delta in the wisdom you obtain, between a few side projects over months and battle hardened experience with real products and code bases over years, is immense.

> whole grains

Yet the glycemic index of whole wheat bread is higher than Coca Cola. (Look it up!) I.e. the same amount of calories of bread will spike your blood sugar more quickly than Coke.

Metabolically, starchy foods including grains are a lot more like sugar than people who think they are making rational health decisions want to believe.