Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« on: February 17, 2006, 01:48:40 AM »
Scientists have found a statistically significant, positive correlation between the number of hours a person sleeps in a night and how sick they are the following day.

P.S. This is really an exercise in spotting pseudoscience. The first christian, ID believing, person to correctly tell me why this statement is true and why the conclusion is pseudoscience (specifically I'm looking for a popular phrase about correlation) literally gets an Australian $1 coin. That's right, I will go to the post office and literally mail a $1 Aussie coin to your desired address anywhere on this flat or round earth.

This is for my hypothesis that ID believers cannot even spot extraordinarily simple tricks covered by complex scientific words. If nobody correctly figures it out within 1 month, I will give the $1 to the most demonic worshipping society I can find, and I will give $1 to the church of scientology. If I get no replies I'll probably just have a hissy fit.

This is not BS, the statement is 100% true and I will mail $1 to a winner or given a month with no correct answers, give $1 to the devil and $1 to scientology.

Disclaimer: I am making no relationship between the devil and scientology, I just thought this would provide the most motivation for christians.
ou can't spell idiot without ID.

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2006, 01:52:05 AM »
You are a crazy mut$#@^%*! I wonder if any of these ppl can understand it.

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #2 on: February 17, 2006, 02:10:04 AM »
Realist please theres no challenge in that. But it should prove amusing to see if any of them can answer it. So i'll just sit back and watch.
latearthers. The universes way of telling us, "No matter what you do to think your stupid, theres always sombody stupider then you"

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Daniel

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Re: Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #3 on: February 17, 2006, 02:44:42 AM »
I'm assuming already-sick people tend to have different sleep patterns (either sleeping more because they are weak or sleeping less because they are uncomfortable) than already-healthy people.  So their health influences the amount they sleep rather than the other way around.

Quote from: "Realist"
Scientists have found a statistically significant, positive correlation between the number of hours a person sleeps in a night and how sick they are the following day.

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #4 on: February 17, 2006, 05:24:54 AM »
Sorry Daniel but if Realist is doing what I think then that would be a negative, but wait for his response I supsoe.
latearthers. The universes way of telling us, "No matter what you do to think your stupid, theres always sombody stupider then you"

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EnragedPenguin

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #5 on: February 17, 2006, 08:47:28 AM »
Correlation does not imply causation.
A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #6 on: February 17, 2006, 09:26:46 AM »
Millions of people die in their sleep every year.

OMG, I WIN!
nd that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.

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joffenz

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #7 on: February 17, 2006, 09:37:53 AM »
Quote from: "EnragedPenguin"
Correlation does not imply causation.


I believe that's correct. Now you just need to give him your address, and you'll get that dollar!

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EnragedPenguin

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #8 on: February 17, 2006, 11:36:10 AM »
Quote from: "cheesejoff"
Quote from: "EnragedPenguin"
Correlation does not imply causation.


I believe that's correct. Now you just need to give him your address, and you'll get that dollar!


YES!!! Now if I ever go to Australia I'll be able to...buy a candy bar... or something.
A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.

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Erasmus

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #9 on: February 17, 2006, 11:53:00 AM »
Quote from: "cheesejoff"
Quote from: "EnragedPenguin"
Correlation does not imply causation.


I believe that's correct. Now you just need to give him your address, and you'll get that dollar!


Er, the "article" makes no claims about causation.
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

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joffenz

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #10 on: February 17, 2006, 01:24:58 PM »
Quote from: "Erasmus"
Quote from: "cheesejoff"
Quote from: "EnragedPenguin"
Correlation does not imply causation.


I believe that's correct. Now you just need to give him your address, and you'll get that dollar!


Er, the "article" makes no claims about causation.


Yeah, that's the point, it's meant to sound like it does but it doesn't.

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Erasmus

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #11 on: February 17, 2006, 01:31:26 PM »
Quote from: "cheesejoff"
Yeah, that's the point, it's meant to sound like it does but it doesn't.


Ahh, now I get it....
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #12 on: February 22, 2006, 02:34:42 PM »
Yah, although that statement gets applied far too often.

What the fuck do you do to prove something in science then? No matter what data you collect, and analyze, you'll always get some idiot telling you that phrase when it clearly doesn't apply. :-)

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Erasmus

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #13 on: February 22, 2006, 04:14:28 PM »
Quote from: "johnsmith"
What the fuck do you do to prove something in science then? No matter what data you collect, and analyze, you'll always get some idiot telling you that phrase when it clearly doesn't apply. :-)


You don't prove anything in science.  You assume that induction is a good way of getting knowledge, basically I guess on the assumption that the universe isn't going to turn itself upside down just to screw up your theory.

Also, the whole concept of causation is not well-defined.  Nevertheless, people seem to be in agreement that for A to cause B:
1)  A is correlated with B.
2)  A comes chronologically before B.
3)  A and B do not have some common cause.

However it seems that it  should be pretty easy to "break"  this definition of causality.

Anyway, when some idiot says, "correlation is not causation", what they might mean is that "correlation is good, but you need more, and you haven't demonstrated either of parts (2) and (3)."

-Erasmus
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #14 on: February 23, 2006, 02:31:23 PM »
No, regardless of what the situation may be, idiots will bleat on with 'correlation does not equal causation, because of your item 3).

I've argued with idiots who have no grasp of science or math, yet they know that one phrase, and I can't manage to explain to them how experimentation nullifies their claims.

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Erasmus

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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #15 on: February 23, 2006, 04:17:22 PM »
Quote from: "johnsmith"
I've argued with idiots who have no grasp of science or math, yet they know that one phrase


They have "a little learning."
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #16 on: April 07, 2006, 07:16:38 PM »
From classes that I've taken, you can not just use statistics to imply causality, you have to perform a repeatable experiment that shows that A actually causes B.

Statistics can be used as the basis for performing an experiment though.
So that data could then be the impetus to perform an experiment to see if sleep does cause sickness.

Something like having groups of people randomly assigned to groups, where they are made to sleep very specific lengths of time, and then seeing if anything happens to them health wise.

This can then be used to see if A actually causes B.

As opposed to

B causes A (people who are sickly, sleep longer)

Or there is a third factor, C, which causes both A and B. (People with stressful jobs are more tired, and thus sleep longer, and suffer from more stress induced sickness.)

There is an example of this that was presented in a course I took:

The crime rate increases with increased sales of ice cream.

This would imply that Ice cream is the cause of increased crime. The real cause being that in summer months, people buy more ice cream, and that crime also increases in the summer.

Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #17 on: May 23, 2006, 09:44:57 PM »
"how sick they are" is not a variable, there is no scientific measurement. It is more of an opinion, I might think one diases is worse than another, and you might think the opposite. Also, diases are caused by diiferent things, such as viruses, bacteria.

I'm also a christian, I wasn't sure If yo wanted my to say that
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Sleeping is detrimental to your health, $1 PRIZE!!!
« Reply #18 on: May 23, 2006, 10:09:02 PM »
How could I not see this? That would mean that the more you sleep, the sicker you are in the morning. I must be tired, its getting late. goodnight everyone
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