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Health Nerd Profile picture
@GidMK
May 9 • 11 tweets • 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
The entire #DiedSuddenly narrative is based on a very basic misunderstanding of causality

If B happens after A, we can't simply assume that A CAUSED B

As they say, correlation =/= causation
(Of course, in many cases people who are claimed to have died suddenly either didn't die, or weren't vaccinated, because the movement thrives on lies, but let's leave that aside for a second)
A very famous example of the challenges of causal inference is the case of ice cream and drownings

There is a strong and consistent correlation between more people eating ice cream and more drownings happening in the US Image
This is an old example of confounding - ice cream is eaten more in summer, when people also swim more

Summer is causing an increase in both ice cream and drowning deaths
The point is, you can't just assume that one thing correlating with a past or current event means that there's a causal relationship there

Which is why we do scientific studies. To look at the data, rather than opinions
But that's never the case when someone is thought to have died due to a vaccination by conspiracists online. No one looks back at 2019 and compares the objective rates of sudden cardiac events, controlling for age, population, seasonality, etc
For example, it may come as a surprise to some people that we've known for decades that sudden cardiac death is a big killer of elite athletes (this article from 2016) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Anyway, tallying up cherry-picked news and social media reports is a fundamentally illogical approach, so even if it was being done with the best intentions there'd be little meaning to be garnered from such woefully inadequate analysis
Oh, also, it is absolutely bizarre that people claim that no one is researching these issues. COVID-19 vaccines are some of the most well-researched medical products ever created, that research just doesn't match up well with the personal opinions of conspiracists 🤷‍♂️
People seem very confused about this, so I should also add that this issue is not at all true for COVID-19 deaths, for which we have abundant and strong evidence of the direct cause (as opposed to unsourced rumours online) gidmk.medium.com/covid-19-death…
The difference is that most "Died Suddenly" rumours come about based on third-party assumptions, rather than the doctor who is treating the person ascertaining the cause of death on their death certificate

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
May 10
Ok friends, tell me what looks VERY odd about this Table 1 of a randomized trial

Difficulty: 👀👀👀 Image
Ok, things I noticed:
1. If the p-values given were correct, this data is extremely unlikely (billions to 1) to have come from a truly randomized trial
2. Most of the p-values are either impossible (i.e. gender) or wrong
3. The distribution of trailing digits (Benford's) is unlikely to have come from real data. For example, there are 71/96 even numbers, which is about a 1 in a million chance
4. There are obvious numeric errors (i.e. gender)
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
May 4
Most of the time when someone says that they're "steelmanning" an argument they're engaging in the time-honoured debating technique of "lying through your teeth and hoping no one notices"
Steelmanning is, in theory, the opposite of a straw man - instead of engaging with a laughable parody of your opponent's argument, you attack the strongest possible version of their supposed beliefs. When you emerge victorious, they'll have no option but to concede defeat
Of course, this doesn't make much sense when you think about it for more than a second. Regardless of how you reconstruct someone's point, you're still crafting a version of their argument that you know you can beat
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
May 4
There's an inherent tension between the fact that lots of things are extremely uncertain and our need to make decisions anyway
On the one hand, you've got a decision to make, say between option A and B

That's a binary choice. No wiggle room. Do one or the other
But scientific evidence often operates in shades of grey. There are a few places where we've got clear and consistent evidence for one thing over another (i.e. smoking vs not smoking), but often the evidence is pretty uncertain
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
May 1
It's always funny to me how the anti-vaccine crowd gets furious at Big Pharma but no one ever proposes an alternative

...I guess we could nationalize the pharmaceutical industry?
You can avoid pharma to some extent by using fewer medications, but if you replace those with supplements you're just giving your money to another massive, multibillion dollar industry
Or you can subscribe to your local health guru, who is also part of a large, multibillion dollar industry 🤔
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
May 1
I remember learning all of this in undergraduate psychology and feeling so surprised that IQ was essentially a scam for any purpose other than measuring the ability to take tests
For example, something I learned in university is that you can improve your test scores on most IQ tests through training and other measures, which would not be possible if they measured some immutable construct Image
I mean, there's a whole group of earnest researchers looking into the fascinating phenomenon of human intellect and cognitive ability, then there's the psychometric testing industry which relies on pretending that IQ tests are a perfect representation of intelligence
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
Apr 30
My favourite thing about the idea of "echo chambers" online is how for most of human history you'd almost never talk to people who fundamentally disagreed with you, but suddenly it's extremely important just because they can create anonymous accounts on Twitter
My parents' generation mostly talked to their friends and read the newspaper, and while you might occasionally hear disagreement it was generally very minimal stuff
Now, you get bombarded with vitriol from people behaving in a way they never would in person, and the argument is that since they have a different viewpoint to your own it's important that you listen
Read 6 tweets

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