Oh man. That’s truly pathetic, and very sad. Also, very scary.
congenital cynicsays
That first line alone is a massive indictment of the schooling that too many people get in the US (in this case it might be religious based home schooling, but who knows).
blfsays
I really really hope the Likes admire the maths and assumptions as much as most readers here probably do…
cartomancersays
Apparently being gay, trans or infertil (I think it’s a kind of heart medicine) makes you immune from autism. Who knew?
That’s a real comment?! Ok, I’ve now lost the thin thread of sanity/hope I’ve been holding on to.
blfsays
pgarayt@11, Hum… Is it a real comment (read: not a Poe)?
Good question!
Ignoring the unique maths and invalid assumptions, it has good sentence structure and punctuation, the logic (such as it is) is easy to follow, the despite the typos(?) in the initial sentences, the final sentences contain correctly-spelled words like debilitated, armageddon, population, and, notably, autism, plus others. And the “typos” are all quite amusing.
Looked at in that manner, there would seem to be a whiff of Poe?
microraptorsays
cartermancer @10:
Certainly not this autistic transgender lesbian.
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
Now now, PZ, I’ve been “reliably” informed that making fun of this kind of ignorance is
classist!
(Can’t tell if the gumbies are coming through from the preview :/)
Immunity to the evil Autism vaccines must be of those super-powers that all The Gays get; like dancing and fashion sense.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Sounds like the math the Rethugs use. Cut taxes, tank the economy, then revenues increase.
The logic gets lost somewhere in never-never land.
Gregory Greenwoodsays
That is nothing short of painful to read. How to one get from 1 in 50 to 50%? Why assume that half of all men will be gay, trans-men (hey, at least this idiot included trans-men amongst all the other blokes, that is almost progress), or infertile? Why suddenly start talking about cancer out of nowhere? And apparently expecting this person to grasp the existence of a spectrum of autism disorders of varying degrees of severity is utterly unreasonable. And all this built upon the thoroughly debunked lie that vaccinations and autism are linked to begin with.
How is it even possible to go through life without such basic skills of mathematics and reasoned thought in a modern society?
Gregory Greenwoodsays
blf @ 12;
Ignoring the unique maths and invalid assumptions, it has good sentence structure and punctuation, the logic (such as it is) is easy to follow, the despite the typos(?) in the initial sentences, the final sentences contain correctly-spelled words like debilitated, armageddon, population, and, notably, autism, plus others. And the “typos” are all quite amusing.
Looked at in that manner, there would seem to be a whiff of Poe?
In many ways it doesn’t matter if it is – all too many people really do think this way, and would nod along in agreement to everything here, alt-world maths and all. The anti-vaxxers are so far down the rabbit hole that parody is entirely redundant at this point, and simply adds to the background noise of all the ignorant chatter they do spout interminably.
Unfortunately, so many people are buying into this that the anti-vaxxers are starting to garner the makings of real power, and that should frighten all of us.
kevinalexandersays
It seems like less people have fewer understanding of Inglish.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))says
worksheet:
1 out of 50 boys autistc autistic
50% lessfewer boys for marriage
meaning: without autism, only 2 out of 50 boys would be worth marrying. huh?
then: the 50% left [those without autism] will be icky
therefore autism is immunity from icky
/worksheet so much wrong, not even bias, just a whole lotta nuffin. No thinking at all in that tweet.
Twitter sure provides a vehicle for random word association.
This has a whiff to me of the good old “If we don’t suppress the gays they’ll recruit all our children!” trope.
vaiytsays
This isn’t math, it’s gibberish. 1/50 is not the same as 50%. I couldn’t read past that.
leskimopiesays
I wonder what this person thinks autism is that it renders anyone on the autism spectrum to be incapable of marriage and/or siring a child?
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))says
[sic]Pediatrician will weak up to the reality that there is no babies to take care, […]
edit:
– Pediatrician –> Pediatricians
– weak –> wake
– is –> are
– take care –> take care of
=> Pediatricians will wake up to the reality that there are no babies to care of, …
/I guess????
even correcting the tpyos still leaves unsubstantiated faux-logic behind. yuck
ck, the Irate Lumpsays
I hope just about everyone just replied with that Nathan Fillion speechless animated gif.
WhiteHatLurkersays
I note that the post is tagged as “edited” – I wonder what it said prior to the edits.
I am going to call “Poe” on this. As @blf noted, subtle things like the use of “lose” rather than the more typical “loose” hints of more sophistication than is supposed to be portrayed.
More damningly, I cannot find any references to this, other than people transcribing the image’s text. Perhaps this was originally posted on a private site, but the only source I found referenced was Imgur.
archangelospumonisays
What are the chances a Drumpfh supporter/voter posted this gem?
blfsays
How to one get from 1 in 50 to 50%?
I have a very vague memory of once reading somewhere that an amazing percentage of people who should know, don’t “get” / understand / grok percentages, even at a very basic level. Certainly, many people (including myself!) feckup calculating with percentages all the time; to borrow an example:
[… I]f you imagine getting a 20% off coupon, you would multiply by 0.8 to get the new amount. If you wanted to pay for a meal that that cost $20, with 20% off would save $4 and pay $16. I believe that is the mathematically correct definition of reducing something by 20%.
But I have noticed that when percentages get discussed in the news, politicians, pundits and reporters often just subtract the percentage. For a hypothetical example, say the news reported, “Death rates fell 2%, from 12% to 10%.” Mathematically, reducing a death rate from 12% to 10% is actually lowering the death rate by 16.7%, not 2%. (If in a population of 1000 people, 100 people die instead of 120, mathematically, 16.7% more survivors.)
Some (admittedly very trivial) searching mostly only found claims of poor understanding in the financial / economics realm. And it seems most of those claims were about the “calculating with” problem, rather than the “very basic understanding” problem supposedly illustrated by the what the OP quotes.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))says
re 28:
[innumeracy cop at your service] I too object to isuse of math:
EG
fact: death rates went from 2% to 1%
headline: death rates cut in half
dis: death rates dropped by only 1%
wzrd1says
@blf, you are absolutely correct. I was hoping someone would’ve realized and explained that when I wrote what I did in #2.
I also saw an earlier version of the drivel, where it was 50% of children will get X, 50% will get Y and 50% will get Z, the rest will just die.
As every percentage mentioned in the drivel added to 150% (unless of course, they got X&Y or some other permutation of a mixture, which was not suggested), I could only expect a fourth 50%, adding to 200% in their incomprehension of mathematics.
That said, it would be highly entertaining to see how they’d divide up a pie, while using their version of percentages.
I tend to refer to their mathematical methodology as “sermon on the mount math”, where their lack of comprehension that a divide by zero does not add infinity to the availability of that which is being divided.
meaning: without autism, only 2 out of 50 boys would be worth marrying. huh?
That sounds correct to me.
+++
Of course, people on the autism spectrum as well as gay people of all genders have children and get married and just like with neurotypical heteros, those circles don’t overlap 100%
lindsaysays
Huh. My mom is on the spectrum. Do I not really exist?
janiceclanfieldsays
So what’s the downside?
llyrissays
#32 Lindsay
“Hih. My mom is on the spectrum. Do I not really exist?”
You don’t. And neither does your mom. Only boys can be autistic. All girls are completely normal amd incapable of getting pregnant except through marriage to a completely normal heterosexual jock. Duh.
roachiesmomsays
Lindsey@32; llyris@ 34
Now I am really confused. Or would be if I existed. But since I don’t, no worries then, yes?
Except now I have to go tell my kids they don’t exist, either. Because if Lindsey is imaginary because of her mom, my kids have the same affliction, which they got from their imaginary autistic mother.
The guy I married and had imaginary kids with was not a jock. He turned out to be a huge jerk, though…is that close enough enough?
roachiesmomsays
If I existed, I would be really, really pissed off about that second “enough”I missed in preview.
birgerjohanssonsays
A certain D. Trump just said ” ‘We’re going to have a very much great country’
English is not my native language , but I think there is something odd about the statement. Is this a sub-variant of English (something like “Republican English”) ?
John Moralessays
birgerjohansson, it’s just garbled.
(Your English, BTW, is quite excellent)
Were it to be ‘We’re very much going to have a great country’, it would be grammatical, if slightly odd.
birgerjohanssonsays
John, I found an example of why garbled communications are dangerous. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-01-27
— — — — — —
“no babies to care of, …”
You know what this means?
We have abolished all abortions!
— —
Cartomancer,
“Infertil” is a code name for a sinister organization of Bond villains, like SPECTRE. Their main enemy is Toys R Us.
lucifersbikesays
Nobody told me and my wife autistic people couldn’t have babies. We had two who have survived into adulthood despite their father’s general incompetence and their mother’s (usually) mild autism.
wzrd1says
@lucifersbike, I’ve had a tea party type tell me that junior enlisted service members shouldn’t have children, as due to the low pay scale, they required welfare to support their children.
It was OK to get killed for your country, but not OK for the country one is defending to help support a family.
Suffice it to say, that comment, in a very public place, was ill received. Especially so, as it was made in a service town, right off of a major US military base.
As for my mathematical skills, complex mathematics is easy enough, boolean logic is trivial, regular expressions are child’s play. Crunching numbers, well, that’s what computers are for.
OK, cranking out simple math by hand, well, the results, save if I have reams of paper, can be quite entertaining. But, at least I’m good enough to realize, “Hey, that doesn’t look quite right” and go back over it again.
Or as I joke, I can take my shoes and socks off and count to 20, but the last time I got to 21, I was arrested.
The surest sign of armageddon: Toys R Us has to close a few stores.
Ah, the good old, I’m giving it my all, all 200%.
Brilliant math in the first sentence, on top of unjustified assumption.
That thing must be really powerful, probably quantum, to make 48 of every 50 boys vanish. Wonder why it has no effect on girls?
It is probably also worth noting thet Nestlé make a hell of a lot more than Baby formula.
WTF? Is Sarah Palin selling a new line of word salad spinners now? Seems like everybody in the republican camp has one.
Oh man. That’s truly pathetic, and very sad. Also, very scary.
That first line alone is a massive indictment of the schooling that too many people get in the US (in this case it might be religious based home schooling, but who knows).
I really really hope the Likes admire the maths and assumptions as much as most readers here probably do…
Apparently being gay, trans or infertil (I think it’s a kind of heart medicine) makes you immune from autism. Who knew?
That’s a real comment?! Ok, I’ve now lost the thin thread of sanity/hope I’ve been holding on to.
pgarayt@11, Hum… Is it a real comment (read: not a Poe)?
Good question!
Ignoring the unique maths and invalid assumptions, it has good sentence structure and punctuation, the logic (such as it is) is easy to follow, the despite the typos(?) in the initial sentences, the final sentences contain correctly-spelled words like debilitated, armageddon, population, and, notably, autism, plus others. And the “typos” are all quite amusing.
Looked at in that manner, there would seem to be a whiff of Poe?
cartermancer @10:
Certainly not this autistic transgender lesbian.
Now now, PZ, I’ve been “reliably” informed that making fun of this kind of ignorance is
(Can’t tell if the gumbies are coming through from the preview :/)
cartermancer @10:
Immunity to the evil Autism vaccines must be of those super-powers that all The Gays get; like dancing and fashion sense.
Sounds like the math the Rethugs use. Cut taxes, tank the economy, then revenues increase.
The logic gets lost somewhere in never-never land.
That is nothing short of painful to read. How to one get from 1 in 50 to 50%? Why assume that half of all men will be gay, trans-men (hey, at least this idiot included trans-men amongst all the other blokes, that is almost progress), or infertile? Why suddenly start talking about cancer out of nowhere? And apparently expecting this person to grasp the existence of a spectrum of autism disorders of varying degrees of severity is utterly unreasonable. And all this built upon the thoroughly debunked lie that vaccinations and autism are linked to begin with.
How is it even possible to go through life without such basic skills of mathematics and reasoned thought in a modern society?
blf @ 12;
In many ways it doesn’t matter if it is – all too many people really do think this way, and would nod along in agreement to everything here, alt-world maths and all. The anti-vaxxers are so far down the rabbit hole that parody is entirely redundant at this point, and simply adds to the background noise of all the ignorant chatter they do spout interminably.
Unfortunately, so many people are buying into this that the anti-vaxxers are starting to garner the makings of real power, and that should frighten all of us.
It seems like less people have fewer understanding of Inglish.
worksheet:
1 out of 50 boys
autistcautistic50%
lessfewer boys for marriagemeaning: without autism, only 2 out of 50 boys would be worth marrying. huh?
then:
therefore autism is immunity from icky
/worksheet
so much wrong, not even bias, just a whole lotta nuffin. No thinking at all in that tweet.
Twitter sure provides a vehicle for random word association.
This has a whiff to me of the good old “If we don’t suppress the gays they’ll recruit all our children!” trope.
This isn’t math, it’s gibberish. 1/50 is not the same as 50%. I couldn’t read past that.
I wonder what this person thinks autism is that it renders anyone on the autism spectrum to be incapable of marriage and/or siring a child?
edit:
– Pediatrician –> Pediatricians
– weak –> wake
– is –> are
– take care –> take care of
=>
/I guess????
even correcting the tpyos still leaves unsubstantiated faux-logic behind. yuck
I hope just about everyone just replied with that Nathan Fillion speechless animated gif.
I note that the post is tagged as “edited” – I wonder what it said prior to the edits.
I am going to call “Poe” on this. As @blf noted, subtle things like the use of “lose” rather than the more typical “loose” hints of more sophistication than is supposed to be portrayed.
More damningly, I cannot find any references to this, other than people transcribing the image’s text. Perhaps this was originally posted on a private site, but the only source I found referenced was Imgur.
What are the chances a Drumpfh supporter/voter posted this gem?
I have a very vague memory of once reading somewhere that an amazing percentage of people who should know, don’t “get” / understand / grok percentages, even at a very basic level. Certainly, many people (including myself!) feckup calculating with percentages all the time; to borrow an example:
Some (admittedly very trivial) searching mostly only found claims of poor understanding in the financial / economics realm. And it seems most of those claims were about the “calculating with” problem, rather than the “very basic understanding” problem supposedly illustrated by the what the OP quotes.
re 28:
[innumeracy cop at your service] I too object to isuse of math:
EG
fact: death rates went from 2% to 1%
headline: death rates cut in half
dis: death rates dropped by only 1%
@blf, you are absolutely correct. I was hoping someone would’ve realized and explained that when I wrote what I did in #2.
I also saw an earlier version of the drivel, where it was 50% of children will get X, 50% will get Y and 50% will get Z, the rest will just die.
As every percentage mentioned in the drivel added to 150% (unless of course, they got X&Y or some other permutation of a mixture, which was not suggested), I could only expect a fourth 50%, adding to 200% in their incomprehension of mathematics.
That said, it would be highly entertaining to see how they’d divide up a pie, while using their version of percentages.
I tend to refer to their mathematical methodology as “sermon on the mount math”, where their lack of comprehension that a divide by zero does not add infinity to the availability of that which is being divided.
That sounds correct to me.
+++
Of course, people on the autism spectrum as well as gay people of all genders have children and get married and just like with neurotypical heteros, those circles don’t overlap 100%
Huh. My mom is on the spectrum. Do I not really exist?
So what’s the downside?
#32 Lindsay
“Hih. My mom is on the spectrum. Do I not really exist?”
You don’t. And neither does your mom. Only boys can be autistic. All girls are completely normal amd incapable of getting pregnant except through marriage to a completely normal heterosexual jock. Duh.
Lindsey@32; llyris@ 34
Now I am really confused. Or would be if I existed. But since I don’t, no worries then, yes?
Except now I have to go tell my kids they don’t exist, either. Because if Lindsey is imaginary because of her mom, my kids have the same affliction, which they got from their imaginary autistic mother.
The guy I married and had imaginary kids with was not a jock. He turned out to be a huge jerk, though…is that close enough enough?
If I existed, I would be really, really pissed off about that second “enough”I missed in preview.
A certain D. Trump just said ” ‘We’re going to have a very much great country’
English is not my native language , but I think there is something odd about the statement. Is this a sub-variant of English (something like “Republican English”) ?
birgerjohansson, it’s just garbled.
(Your English, BTW, is quite excellent)
Were it to be ‘We’re very much going to have a great country’, it would be grammatical, if slightly odd.
John, I found an example of why garbled communications are dangerous. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-01-27
— — — — — —
“no babies to care of, …”
You know what this means?
We have abolished all abortions!
— —
Cartomancer,
“Infertil” is a code name for a sinister organization of Bond villains, like SPECTRE. Their main enemy is Toys R Us.
Nobody told me and my wife autistic people couldn’t have babies. We had two who have survived into adulthood despite their father’s general incompetence and their mother’s (usually) mild autism.
@lucifersbike, I’ve had a tea party type tell me that junior enlisted service members shouldn’t have children, as due to the low pay scale, they required welfare to support their children.
It was OK to get killed for your country, but not OK for the country one is defending to help support a family.
Suffice it to say, that comment, in a very public place, was ill received. Especially so, as it was made in a service town, right off of a major US military base.
As for my mathematical skills, complex mathematics is easy enough, boolean logic is trivial, regular expressions are child’s play. Crunching numbers, well, that’s what computers are for.
OK, cranking out simple math by hand, well, the results, save if I have reams of paper, can be quite entertaining. But, at least I’m good enough to realize, “Hey, that doesn’t look quite right” and go back over it again.
Or as I joke, I can take my shoes and socks off and count to 20, but the last time I got to 21, I was arrested.