I guess I'm not very versed in website A/B testing, but wouldn't it be much better to analyze these results in a regression framework where you can correct for the covariates?
On top of this, logistic regression makes your units a lot more interpretable than just looking at differences in means. I.E. The odds of buying something are 1.1 when you are assigned in group B.
This is the correct approach, but having done A/B testing for many years (and basically moved away from this area of work), nobody in the industry really cares about understanding the problem they care about prompting themselves as experts and creating the illusion of rigorous marketting.
Correct A/B testing should involved starting with an A/A test to validate the setup, building a basic causal model of what you expect the treatment impact to be, controlling of covariates, and finally ensuring that when the causal factor is controlled for the results change as expected.
But even the "experts" I've read in this area largely focus on statistical details that honestly don't matter (and if they do the change you're proposing is so small that you shouldn't be wasting time on it).
In practice if you need "statistical significance" to determine if change has made an impact on your users you're already focused on problems that are too small to be worth your time.
Ok so, that’s interesting. I like examples so are you saying I should build a “framework” that presents two (landing) pages exactly the same, and (hopefully) is able to collect things like what source the visitor came from, maybe some demographics. And I then try to get 100 impressions with random blue and red buttons, then check to see if there is some confounding factor (blue was always picked by females linking from google ads) and then remove the random next time and show blue ads to half females from google and half anyone else
I think the dumb underlying question I have is - how does one do experimental design
Edit: and if you aren’t seeing giant obvious improvements, try improving something else (I get the idea that my B is going to be so obvious that there is no need to worry about stats - if it’s not that’s a signal to chnage something else?
There exist some solutions for this that overlay your webpage, and there is a heatmap to show where a user's cursor has traveled to. More popular areas show "hotter" in red, which could show how effective your changes are, or where you may want to center content you're trying to get users to notice around. I haven't directly worked with the data, but have seen the heatmaps from Hotjar on sites I've implemented (doing both frontend and backend development, but not involved in the design or SEO/marketing).
Thank you for the interest and for the suggestion.
Yes, one can analyze A/B tests in a regression framework. In fact, CUPED is an equivalent to the linear regression with a single covariate.
Would it be better? It depends on the definition of "better". There are several factors to consider. Scientific rigor is one of them. So is the computational efficiency.
A/B tests are usually conducted at scale of thousands of randomization units (actually it's more like tens or hundreds of thousands). There are two consequences:
1. Computational efficiency is very important, especially if we take into account the number of experiments and the number of metrics. And pulling granular data into a Python environment and fitting a regression is much less efficient than calculating aggregated statistics like mean and variance.
2. I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure that, at such scale, logistic and linear regressions' results will be very close, if not equal.
And even if, for some reason, there is a real need to analyze a test using logistic model, multi-level model, or a clustered error, in tea-tasting, it's possible via custom metrics: https://tea-tasting.e10v.me/custom-metrics/
> And pulling granular data into a Python environment and fitting a regression is much less efficient than calculating aggregated statistics like mean and variance.
This is not true. You almost never need to perform logistic regression on individual observations. Consider that estimating a single Bernoulli rv on N observations is the same as estimate a single Binomial rv for k/N. Most common statistical software (e.g. statsmodels) will support this grouped format.
If all of our covariates a discrete categories (which is typically the case for A/B tests) then you only need to regression on the number of examples equal to the number of unique configurations of the variables.
That is if you're running an A/B test on 10 million users across 50 states and 2 variants you only need 100 observations for your final model.
> Most common statistical software (e.g. statsmodels) will support this grouped format.
Interesting, I didn't know this about statsmodels. But maybe documentation a bit misleading: "A nobs x k array where nobs is the number of observations and k is the number of regressors". Source: https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/generated/statsmodels.gen...
I would be grateful for the references on how to apply statsmodels for solving logistic model using only aggregated statistics. Or not statsmodels. Any references will do.
So that will be a bit different than r style formula's using cbind, but yes if you only have a few categories of data using weights makes sense. (Even many of sklearn's functions allow you to pass in weights.)
I have not worked out closed form for logit regression, but for Poisson regression you can get closed form for the incident rate ratio, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/03/18/poisson-designs-and-mi.... So no need to use maximum likelihood at all in that scenario.
Thank you, I'm aware of this. But I don't understand how your link answers my previous message. I was asking for example of how to fit it using only aggregated statistics (focus on "aggregated"). I'm afraid the MCMC or other Bayesian sampling algorithms are not the right examples.
The progress we're seeing in solar has made me the most optimistic about a de-carbonized future in years.
I have no doubt that the decision the Chinese government made to heavily subsidize solar manufacturing will make this world a better place.
Already we're seeing that solar energy is more cost effective than all other forms of energy production [1], that the growth of solar has been consistently underestimated by very large players [2], and that solar democratizes energy production more than any other form of energy.
Distibution needs to be improved, but this issue also holds for other non-fossil energy sources. I predict a lot of these problems will be solved through hydrogen generation and storage [3].
> project life for solar and wind both seem to be 20 years to calculate LCOE
Not disputing, but where do you see this?
> Solar will simply churn along for far longer, while wind will have to becreplaced
We don’t have good numbers for the longevity of wind turbines either, though it’s probably under 25 years [1].
> doubts that presented numbers are accurate
Unlikely. The terminal value of that residual at any reasonable cost of capital is, while non-negligible, not going to be significant. (See Slide 6 for how each source’s LCOE reacts to rates.)
> the decision the Chinese government made to heavily subsidize solar manufacturing
This is often claimed, but does anyone have budget numbers or even a decent order of magnitude estimate for how much subsidy was applied here? Or was it actually the free market supplying compounding cost reductions through technological improvements?
> does anyone have budget numbers or even a decent order of magnitude estimate for how much subsidy was applied
Cheap producer credit, covering up to 50% of new-facility costs and feed-in tariffs [1]. At least the latter began getting phased out after costing Beijing over $15bn in 2017 [2].
Haven’t run the precise numbers, but that one-year figure seems to line up with the IRA’s total solar package [3].
Thanks. [1] in particular is a very interesting read. If I understand it correctly, it's all through subsidy of generation rather than directly of manufacture? That is, while there might be subsidy ensuring demand for the product, if you purchase a solar panel from a Chinese producer at any time during this process there wasn't a direct subsidy included in that cost? Just a guarantee over that time of enough demand to keep the factory chugging along?
That is, it's identical to Western-style renewable subsidies?
> it's all through subsidy of generation rather than directly of manufacture
At least at the federal level, this seems to be the case.
> it's identical to Western-style renewable subsidies?
At least early on, most Western subsidies didn’t discriminate based on where the panel was produced. We also don’t have visibility into provincial books, where if how they treat coal is any indication, where the plants are there to buy coal from their coal mines, there is probably cross subsidy.
But given what we know, one could argue they’re structurally similar, at least in respect to what we’re doing now.
There was a report from MIT a few years back that looked into the price reductions of solar between 1978 and 2012, during which time module costs fell by 97%.
They suggest that early on R&D support from government was key, then later market support to help grow the scale of deployment. Since 2001 its been manufacturing scale that has dominated price reductions.
It's claimed in the source economist article and reuters also claims it [1].
It's unlikely that the Chinese government wants to say how much it subsidizes, as this will prompt tariff increases from importing countries.
Let's be absolutely clear, euthanasia is not widespread anywhere. It's legal in a few jurisdictions, and it's not something that is taken lightly by any party involved. It's extremely rare for a young person to be granted euthanasia in the Netherlands, and only when the individual suffers without any hope for remit.
This lady has tried to be granted euthanasia for years now, after suffering from a serious disease for all her life. Without any treatment that helped her.
In all those years, she has tried to cure herself of the disease, but to no consequence. I think she deserves to get what _she_ wants with dignity.
For years, I thought I'd tried everything. I was surrounded by people saying "you can't run for your problems."
I'm incredibly glad I decided to ignore them as a hail mary and I'm sure as shit glad I wasn't posting here. I'd be dead with people calling me brave and saying I died with dignity. Glad I lived to instead be shamed for encouraging people to explore other options before taking a final solution. It's impossible to be more self-destructive than the people saying this is great.
Unfortunately this is not the case for a very small minority of individuals who suffer without a cure. I prefer these people to go through their process with dignity, than to go for the other option.
Even if there were a cure in the future, there isn't one now. That's not the medical system giving up, that's being realistic. Having to wait while unbearably suffering is not something that can be expected of someone.
I prefer a system where there is a good procedure for death with dignity than one where we are not allowed to help someone end their prolonged and unbearable suffering.
This article is disingenuous by only referring to expert opinion from a Christian university, which is obviously against euthanasia. Experts from other universities would provide a more nuanced view on the subject.
Furthermore when the article discusses an increase in numbers, they don't mention that 60% of euthanasia is performed for individuals who suffer from late stage cancer. Most others are generally very old, and will only suffer without remit for the rest of their lives.
The procedure for this woman to have been granted euthanasia is not something that is easy to get through. It is mentioned she has suffered from this disease for all of her life and there is no cure. Multiple medical doctors need to be in agreement before a request for euthanasia is granted in any case. There is even more scrutiny when it is about a young person as well as when the disease is mental in nature.
In all, I hated reading this article, because it's extremely far from the truth about how the Netherlands have implemented their euthanasia laws. I suggest reading up on it from more reputable sources than `the mirror`
Fundamentally this is not different at all from suicide. Every physically healthy and conscious person is capable of committing it if they were strongly want to. So why would we as a society want to make it more acceptable and encourage people to see it as a perfectly viable option?
Also where do we a draw a line? If we're talking about terminally ill patients it's usually fairly clear. Surely there are many mentally ill (suffering from severe depression etc. not intellectual disability) people who are incapable of rational reasoning (in general or under specific circumstances) so do we end up with having death panels determining who is allowed to kill themselves and who is not?
Given the number of failed suicide attempts, not everyone is capable of committing it successfully.
And they're often forced to use brutal methods that some unfortunate soul then has to discover or clean up (e.g. firearms, jumping, or standing in front of a train)
Giving the long-term-suffering an option of a peaceful and painless way out seems much more compassionate. It just needs the right level of safeguards to stop people doing it impulsively. A 3-6 month 'cooling off period' between booking the appointment and going through with it would likely solve most of the problems (although may be too long if somebody is in severe pain, e.g. late-stage cancer. But separate rules could be used for those who clearly have terminal illnesses)
> Given the number of failed suicide attempts, not everyone is capable of committing it successfully.
Which is actually a good thing if these statistics are correct:
"Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."*
> Giving the long-term-suffering an option of a peaceful and painless way out seems much more compassionate
Also much cheaper for the state/society/healthcare system (and even their families) than investing into providing additional treatment options
> e.g. late-stage cancer. But separate rules could be used for those who clearly have terminal illnesses
IMHO that's an entirely different issue, if all the available options were exhausted and the patient is basically guaranteed to die in N weeks/months while simultaneously suffering more and more giving that person the option to end it sooner seems to both reasonable and compassionate.
How can such certainty exist when were talking about mental illness? The decision made by this person will surely depend on external factors, e.g. if you're poor, your psychiatrist tells you that they can't help you, you don't have any close family to fallback on etc. are you more or less likely to commit suicide than someone who is suffering from a similarly severe issue but has all of those things?
The Netherlands have drawn their line, have a look at their laws [1]. This includes a procedure where multiple medical doctors have to agree to grant someone a death with dignity. I prefer this over unbearable suffering.
All of those conditions seem pretty vague and subjective if we're talking about mental illness.
Statistically the likelihood of a person of chosing or not choosing to go through this will strongly depend on external factors: their financial conditions, family, support network access to healthcare and different treatment options (.e.g when you psychiatrist tells you "There’s nothing more we can do for you" that (optimistically) means there is nothing left that you could afford to or the state/insurance company is willing to pay for, not that there is nothing else that could be tried).
That's a separate argument but long-term this will likely also create false incentives. Euthanasia is certainly cheaper than spending large amounts of money on new treatments and also providing welfare and social services to those people (because on the whole they are guaranteed to be a net drain on the society economically).
Thanks for sharing! I was always wondering how climate scientists were able to identify if an event was due to climate change. Now I have a good reference!
The first slide makes the disclaimer that one is not "able to identify if an event was due to climate change", only likelihoods of certain events occurring under various conditions. People might treat those two things the same due to our mental heuristics, but they are not.
It's true that this method can't say event X was or was not due to condition Y.
But it is fair to say that a pattern of such events that matches (or doesn't) the probabilities given by condition Y is evidence that Y is (or isn't) accurate.
A single heatwave, however anomalous, isn't evidence of anything. Several heatwaves may be ample evidence that one model is more accurate than another.
There is a very strong reason why Airbus does not publicize mishaps of their competitors. Once airline manufacturers start slinging mud at each other it will damage the carefully built trust that they have gained over the years. Neither Airbus nor Boeing want this. Airbus has had it's fair share of mishaps as well, which Boeing has not publicized either.
This is post is not sponsored nor endorsed by Airbus or any other plane manufacturer for that reason. Note that airbus has not done so when the 737 max had 2 accidents that were due to lax regulatory oversight.
This post IS sponsored by a travel company that tries to market their service to a wary public that doesn't want to fly on a potentially badly manufactured airframe.
Scientific reports is read in many places, including in medicine.
Regarding your 'low-impact' comment I have a few thoughts.
1. Although this is a large study, they do not find any world shocking new insights that are otherwise found in other studies. Cholesterol phenotypes are very well studied. Changing a guideline is usually not done based on a study of a single population.
2. They do not account for medication usage which confounds results.
3. They do not find a causal relationship between cholesterol and mortality, only provide an association.
If you're interested the Webb mirror, and the relationship between resolving ability, wavelength and mirror size I really recommend the deep dive Huygens optics did on the subject.
I’m not going to suggest it’s a good idea, but I know when math books became a topic it was supposedly because some type of political stuff was being included in the problems. Haven’t followed it closely but I do remember hearing that.
If very limited references to the fact that racism even exists are "political", then you're getting pretty close to that joke: "What sexual orientation are you, straight, or political?"
There's nothing called "CRT" being taught to grade school kids. Teaching math using statistical examples from the Implicit Association Test is problematic how?
The implicit association test has large numbers of critics. Presenting it as as true as mathematics is disingenuous. In fact, it is a silly idea to link any psychological study to mathematics, as psych studies are notoriously un-replicatable. Better to stick to hard sciences like physics, chem, or biology, or at least well-replicated social studies. But presenting something controversial in line with mathematical facts is not a good idea.
If you think math problem context drives social change then you are going to have to go find me data on people suddenly buying 37 watermelons at a time after math problems we got in the early 2000s
There's actually a very simple argument: The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. Keeping the books out of the library is the best practical method of stopping this, because directly controlling the contents of the curriculum is hard to enforce.
That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible thing that can't ever have a good reason behind it.
Edit: Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. Schools make content-based decisions about what's appropriate for students all the time.
> Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries.
What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.
For one thing, adults are typically not allowed into school libraries during school hours. It's much easier to keep books away from parents interested in knowing what their kids are reading in a school library than a public one, where parents are more likely to be with their child.
But either way, governments cannot stop you from speaking. However, no government office, neither a school library nor a general public one, is or ought to be required to carry your speech.
> However, no government office, neither a school library nor a general public one, is or ought to be required to carry your speech.
That's the opposite of what's actually going on here, though. What's going on is that speech is being prohibited, not that it's being forced to be allowed.
> The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students.
And who determines, with which justification, what should be taught to students? Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial, and I'd expect teachers to be able (and allowed to) make that decision - they know the children under their responsibility the best, not politicians.
That's a good steel man argument, thanks for articulating it. The irony is, they are solving "activists who defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught" by themselves becoming "activists who ban things from being taught". Opposite side of the same coin.
Translation: The above comment is REALLY mad that kids can learn about the existence of gay people or about how sex and STDs are spread and they feel the need to ensure kids are not told about this topic and that teachers get jail time for mentioning it.
Make no mistake, schools make choices all the time. This decision align those choices to far more insane rules by..guess what...an activist government instead.
A great example of this is John Green's Looking For Alaska. It has a sex scene that is objectively banned by this law.
That very sex scene is an example of why sex should not be the primary goal of a relationship (it goes poorly) and is directly contrasted with a moment of actual love in the very next chapter as an example of how sex is not the most valuable thing about a relationship.
It is a scapegoat for politicians and angry...activist...PTA members to simplify the topic "This book has a charater giving a BLOW JOB!!! My 16 year old is asked to READ IT?! These teachers and librarians are sick!" NOBODY's KID SHOULD READ IT.
Might I add, almost EVERY school keeps a list of alternative books and gives parents the option to opt out.
It's Gay marriage and descriptions of sex today, Alan Turing today cannot be fully explained in a book.
Maybe tomorrow it will be Hitler. "It is too violent of a topic and parents should have the right to keep their kids from reading left-wing details like the holocaust."
What would be the other end? At both extremes there is content that more centrist sides disapprove. Should either of the ends be allowed? Or should it swap around as either side gains power in politics?
It's mandatory state/public education, so the curriculum is legislated and kids are forced to be there, and to start, we have a captive audience. The subject legislation was in response to some arguably extreme cases where there is a concerted effort to distribute lgbtq pornography to kids as a way to use critical theories to shift social norms around sexuality, but uniquely using intersectionality - a recognized political pressure technique to do so. It doesn't work on the majority of adults who see it for what it is, and so its proponents have moved upstream and turned to using the tactic directly on children where they will not encounter resistance to the change they seek to make.
There is little argument that the teachers and advocates for these materials in elementary schools have a stated desire to abolish the civilization these children would otherwise grow up to inherit and become stewards of. Call it what you will, all the words are artifacts of the same basic critical theory and premises ('ist, 'phobic, anti-' etc.) that form a whole new language one either speaks and thinks in, or does not. It's designed to alienate and atomize people so as to manage and extract value from the conflicts you as an activist create. Those words are threats it uses to protect the real underlying ideology from rational scrutiny. From an educational perspective, this is not the drawing out and developing of childrens minds, but rather the funneling and shaping them as an openly stated means to create young activists intent on demolishing the pillars of social stability from which all social growth and progress has emerged.
Instead of having kids and raising them the way religion-based societies and cultures do, mormons, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. and being the change, these activists are leveraging the mandates of the education system to undermine the society they wish to upend. A key front in this is teaching intersectionality, where your beliefs become immutable identities under the umbrella of a system of infinitely regressing subjectivity and criticism instead of deriving a free and independent identity from experience and competence. I'm not going to relitigate intersectionality on this thread other than to say it was invented and not discovered, and all of its proponents' arguments reduce to "everything is made of words, words have no fixed meaning, so nothing has fixed meaning, therefore - all things meaning nothing - my belief is equivalent to your experience, there is only struggle for power, and if you disagree, you are my antagonist." It's nihilism all the way down. They imagine themselves engaged in a kind of science by picking random disciplines and testing them to dissolve in their solipsisms.
To do this, some activists are using pornography as a vehicle to inject this critical narrative into the sexual developent of school children, and adulterate these kids' sense of truth and reality by claiming the new concepts in the minds of children as they begin to apprehend them, with words and narrative that subordinates them to the system of criticism the activists are militating for, and with the neutralizing uncertainties of their theory. Florida's legislature has reacted to it by requiring scrutiny of what goes into those schools.
That is a charitable case for Florida's reaction. I can't defend individuals actuated by deeply held hatreds, or who this view might have something in common with, but if we are going to learn about why someone would go so far as to ban this material, it's important to do so with tools that are not merely the artifacts of the hall of mirrors critical theory solipsisms this virus is using to fillibuster, disrupt, harass, and delay rational discussion about it.
There isn't a bland news source that covers the stories of parents reading the explicit content out loud from books at their kids' schools at school board meetings, but it is common enough that Florida responded to it with legislation. If you would like to track down the stories that made the legislation viable, those instances are where I would recommend starting. The most recent example in the news was from a controversy in California about the governor's wife's charity being used to distribute similar material through the school system.
Toward quality discussion, the culture war issue over this isn't just about provincials banning books and how it's a symbolic faux pas, there are very real networks and NGOs coordinating to spread this specific ideology as a means to destablize societies so as to coopt and dominate them, using a really old playbook, and the tools themselves are the conflict and outrage itself, not the details of what those are about. The Florida legislation isn't just a sop to a reactionary base, it's strategic by people who have just begun to fight something they recognize as much worse. When you stop seeing your opponents as merely ignorant and realize they're being as smart and strategic as you are, it's a very different perspective.
For background, I would read Arendt and Solzhenitsyn who saw it first hand, and as a foundation for what current writers like Mattias Desmet, and in a more accessibly popular sense James Lindsay have been writing about with significant depth. All of them write about how popular movements with good and sincere intentions are co-opted and used as vassals for one much more dangerous movement.
Or, to put it in other words, all you can offer is more rumormongering and fearmongering bullshit that isn't even correct about what actually happened: a single teacher once accidentally showed the wrong version of the educational film The Mask You Live In [1] to 12-year-olds in 2019, which accidentally exposed to them to a few more minutes of knowing that blurred-out pornography exists, and a single parent complained, and then nobody else but the right wing hate-o-sphere ever cared again.
To be clear, I offered a concievable and logical rationale for the Florida legislation that was based on summaries of the ideas that moved the people and legislators to implement it. The intent was ideally someone should be able to respond to it with something smarter.
There are more instances than the one this comment references.
However, I will elaborate further on the ideas of Arendt and Desmet that the object of the overarching movement is to make sure that individuals believe and trust nothing, even their own senses, because it will prevent them from resisting the small cadre of people who have historically followed these tactics with violence and terror to subordinate populations. The root of all social "theory," is to produce intellectually stultifying gibberish engines. It's chaff. Their jargon is designed to cost you time, create uncertainty, and "neutralize" you so that the sufficient condition of good men doing nothing is met.
The charitable rationale for people revolting against social justice in schools is that they recognize it is disingenuous, and that it's incumbent on the advocates of these theories to demonstrate that they are compassionate, honest, magnanimous, humane, and exercise other positive viritues, as if they aren't, you probably don't want them near your kids.
Is this what a charitable case looks like? It sounds like a regurgitation of a conspiratorial fantasy. I'd hate to see what the uncharitable case looks like.
Which for some, (like me), is ludicrous. My own take is that children learn best (or for some, learn at all) when their interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher. (I only did homework for teachers I liked throughout my time in elementary and high school.) I claim most of what we learn in school is completely irrelevant to our lives anyway (with a clear exception of learning to read at all). My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. "Teaching the curriculum" also leads to the textbooks that came into use after the "No child left behind" legislation. When I read them, I was simultaneously outraged and wanted to cry at (a) how dry they were (b) how memorization-focused they were (c) (for Euclidian Geometry) how much wrong information they contained.
With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
Perhaps. She did know how to use a calculator, and generally she does better at arithmetic things than I do (balancing the checkbook, eg.) because she knows she's not good, whereas I know I'm good, so I'm more careless. Also, math wasn't and isn't important in many jobs, including hers. So "explains a lot of the problems this country is in" isn't the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be. No offense intended.
> interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher
Don't you see how this is a direct example of teachers having outsized influence on students, and how they shouldn't be allowed to 'teach' them whatever the please?
People put education on some kind of pedestal. Like it's a magical place of discovery. No, it's to provide basic literacy and math skills to the poor so they can function in society.
Conceptually, if the government defines the teaching, at what point do the people run the government and at what point does the government run the people?
Also, politics in America are way more messy than that. The choice becomes "People you agree 50% with or people you agree 20% with?". I would bet that if this were put to a statewide vote, it would not pass.
The community/voters define the government and the government defines the teaching.
Which entity is more in touch with the wants and needs of Florida voters: Florida's state and local governments or the federal government in Washington?
The hiring of teachers is approved by community elected school boards.
FL laws take that power from communities and puts it in State level hands. Your point is upside-down and tries to paint heavy handed big-government rules as better in fact.
Also who said anything about DC? The point was about letting teachers, parents, and yes, minors; make choices for kids. This is whitewashing extremist beliefs over communities that very well may disagree, exactly what you imply this protects lol.
Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? The noisy people and PACs who donate to campaigns are against it and that's all that matters.
I am not familiar with them being well known for lies or fraud. Showing actual video seems like a way to avoid that. The videos seem to speak for themselves. Even if taken out of context it looks reaaaally bad.
It didn't used to be a law, so clearly something has happened that made this idea popular enough to be passed into law.
I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.
Let me be clear that I do not agree at all, in any way with this argument, I'm just answering your question as to what the opinion of people who like this think.
There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
A lot of people replying to this skipped over part of this comment.
I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS ARGUMENT. I AM JUST PUTTING IT HERE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
Having some form of sexual interaction with peers certainly isn't universal but it is well within "normal" for teenagers. The mechanisms of our legal system require us to treat majority as a binary state that people just switch on one day at age 18, but actual development doesn't work like that in any way.
If you enforce on actual people the legal fiction that no one under 18 has ever encountered sexual material in the world or in their own mind, you're creating all sorts of vulnerabilities for them when they do reach 18 and have minimal awareness of their own boundaries, right to have them, and practice enforcing them.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
"Groomers" is very commonly used in this context as a homophoblic slur, conflating queer people with child abuse and pedophilia. If that's not your intention I suggest you don't use it in this way in conversations like this. Grooming is certainly a very serious form of child abuse. Coincidentally I'm sure, depictions of it are also banned by this restriction on books. You are not going to help youths realize they are in this situation if you prevent them from ever engaging with the stories of others who have been.
Yeah. It's rather important to be able to tell the difference between educational books about sex, normal, healthy sexual relationships, and porn. I can understand banning porn that encourages unrealistic expectations from sex (which is a problem), and the other two. If you ban the other two, you can bet children will learn about sex from porn.
Or not at all and be really surprised when they get pregnant.
Because having sex before you are 18 is quite normal? It is odd to pretend otherwise, but 16 for example is quite an usual age, at least here in Europe. I doubt it is actually different in the US.
Most people in the world are sexually active before 18. Your teenage years are you prime years of curiosity. Now, yes, they shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities with older, more mature people. But there's zero problem in late teens just being teens and discovering themselves. The more information they have on how to do that safely, the better. This law (and your puritan line of thinking) does the exact opposite. Expect to see a rise in teenage STDs and pregnancy.
Here's the thing: The argument you have articulated there, whether you agree with it or not, is not actually what is being argued (or at least is not all that is being argued).
It's not actually primarily "books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers" that are being challenged by this. It's books talking about the existence of gay, trans, and other queer people as something other than a horrible sin or a mental defect.
If it were just what you say, then yes, that would still be wrong, and stupid...but what it is, in fact, is wrong, stupid, and horrendously bigoted.
The problem with some of these books is that they normalise horrendous practices, e.g. extreme sex acts like anal fisting, or extreme body modifications like young girls having their breasts amputated because they have a false belief that they are boys.
The books that just talk about standard sex education and give an overview of sexuality aren't a problem. It's these other ones that attempt to push the boundaries to their extremes, that parents and teachers are pushing back on.
So you think being trans is fake and comparable with anal fisting. Cool cool. That means you are precisely one of the people I described, trying to ban books about the existence of gay, trans, and other queer people.
I guarantee you there aren't more than 1 or 2 parents or teachers in the entire country (possibly not even that many, but there's always some nutcase somewhere) who genuinely think that having books on anal fisting available to elementary schoolers is a good thing.
Books on being trans aren't remotely comparable. And, just as an aside, if someone realizes they're trans before they go any significant amount through puberty, they can take very safe hormone treatments in order to ensure they never have to have more expensive and potentially traumatic surgery to present as their true gender.
Unlike books on sexuality, many of these pro-trans books normalise irreversible bodily modifications and present this as if it's a positive thing.
If mature adults want to take wrong-sex hormones, get bits chopped off and turned inside out, and so on, after a long period of consultation and contemplation, then that's acceptable, if that's what they truly need.
But showing this stuff to kids, as if it's a normal option? No way. This is child abuse.
It's also completely unlike being gay, lesbian or bisexual, where no bodily changes whatsoever are encouraged or needed. Also there's no identifying as something you're not, into groups where you don't belong, i.e. so many males thinking it's their right to barge into as many female-only spaces as possible. Really the T is nothing like the LGB at all, it's just that activists use the latter as a shield against criticism of the absurd and abusive demands they're making.
I'm not completely sure that everyone making this argument actually believes it. Presumably there are some who do, but I suspect there's a large portion of people who are looking for a way to selectively fire teachers they don't like. Certainly there are politicians who benefit from stoking outrage, and supporters who enjoy boasting of their commitment to their cause by taking an extreme position on a culture war issue.
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
It is normal. Actually, it's more normal than having sex for the first time after the age of 18, statistically speaking; while the average age of virginity loss in the US has gradually increased over time, it's still at something like 17.
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
It is normal. Teenagers have sex all of the time, and to ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen is dangerous.
> Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults.
Yes, they should. How else do they become functional adults? They need to learn so they can make the right choices when it comes to sex, whether that's abstinence, birth control, etc.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
Yikes. So you're saying people who teach sex ed are "groomers"? If I give my kid a "birds and the bees" book when she's a teenager or younger, I'm a "groomer"? I'm getting the feeling that this is just more right-wing projection.
It's unfortunate that Hacker News doesn't support bold text. I would have bolded it if I could - it seems like a lot of people replying to me completely missed that I don't actually agree with any of these arguments, and am just telling people arguments that those on the other side make.
My eyes also fell directly to your second paragraph and I immediately thought you should step away from the compiler and experience the world if you really believe this. It’s because you wrote it like you were making the argument and there was no separation between yourself in the context it was written.
On top of this, logistic regression makes your units a lot more interpretable than just looking at differences in means. I.E. The odds of buying something are 1.1 when you are assigned in group B.