#statistics specifically

[tae-rhymeswithslay]

Donatello HATES AP Statistics!!

jk he’d probably love it lmao

[kagiura-akira]

Shame I'm not allowed to off snarky salespeople for being blatantly stupid about math

[ahdor]

no no the venn diagram in a rectangle? why are they encased?

[prokopetz]

Beyond providing something to cite, the other benefit of doing "water is wet" type studies is that, like, it's not impossible for people to be reductive about their own experiences. I can think of any number of situations where "everybody knows" that all members of group A experience B, and plenty of members of group A will themselves tell you this is obviously the case, but then somebody actually does the work and it turns out to be substantially more complicated than that.

[tawnysoup]

[jiauro]

Heavy is no longer my least played class

[synelven]

my take on an arcane university au (jinx and ekko are top of the class)

[glassshine]

Where are the American furries from?

based on 19k google form answers

also a per capita version

[chronicallycouchbound]

Almost twice as many people died from COVID-19 in 2021 than all unintentional accidents. COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death. COVID rates are on the rise.

The least you can do is wear a mask.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

One major overlap between Julian Bashir and Seven of Nine is the way they both have heightened, extra-human awareness of their own bodies and cognitive functioning - Seven runs self-diagnostics, Bashir is capable of raising his blood pressure at will - and yet they are both susceptible to human error, in ways that are deeply frustrating to them.

Seven’s initial struggle was in adjusting to being severed from the hive mind and thus reduced and weakened in her perception and capabilities; furthermore, she grew up in an environment where she was only a cog in a machine and any significant physical damage would result in termination. By extension, she is very unwilling to acknowledge physical weakness or vulnerability (as seen in episodes like Imperfection). And much of her arc revolves around her making mistakes despite her assurance of the efficacy and superiority of her methods, and learning to cope with her fallibility.

Bashir, as seen in episodes like The Quickening and Chrysalis, has enormous amounts of trouble dealing with failure, and the former episode makes it clear that his arrogance is wrapped up in his desperate fear of not measuring up (similar to how underneath Seven’s arrogance, she still has traces of the frightened, vulnerable child she once was). The augmentation reveal with Bashir gives a lot of context for that inferiority-superiority complex, and once his genetic enhancements are made public, he seems to feel pressure to make his abilities uniquely useful despite the socially marginalized position in which his enhancements threaten to place him. In Statistical Probabilities, one of his motivations in getting the other enhanced people involved in the statistically generated prognostication is his desire to prove that they can “contribute to society.”

With this in mind, there are some significant threads connecting Statistical Probabilities to The Voyager Conspiracy. Both episodes involve Bashir (along with the other augments) and Seven, respectively, undertaking massively complex cognitive processes in order to synthesize vast amounts of data into speculative conclusions - for potential outcomes of the Dominion War, and for theories regarding how Voyager came to the Delta Quadrant. Both are motivated by the desire to make their unique abilities useful to the institutional structures of which they are a part. And both episodes follow a structure in which each character is able to uncover something true and small-scale - with Bashir and the augments, it’s that the Dominion wants to acquire a planet that will allow them to produce ketracel-white, and with Seven, it’s that there is a photonic flea infestation - only to then have their speculations become much broader in scope and threaten to undermine either the ideals or the cooperative structures surrounding them.

There are significant differences between the episodes. Seven’s speculations are revealed to be straight-up false, and a result of her trying to assimilate more information than she can handle. With Bashir, the veracity of his observations is left ambiguous, and his putting a stop to the other augments’ plan to leak confidential information to the Dominion is largely spurred by political necessity (though the war does unfold differently from anticipated, in large part because of variables no one could have known about at that point). Seven’s failure is more directly linked to human limitations kneecapping her attempt to use her heightened cognitive abilities. But in both cases, their attempts to use mathematical precision in mapping out broad-scale events and systems of cause and effect, in ways that only their minds are capable of, ultimately cannot fulfill the social function they intend for them.

[utilitycaster]

re that post about the warping of valid discussion into something really stupid from last night, obviously that's about real life but I think as with many things it's helpful to use the same analysis for fandom contexts. To use the same pattern:

"Misogyny is a huge problem IRL and in fandom" absolutely true

"If a character is a mother, people tend to judge her primarily on that basis and not as a complete person who exists outside of the context of motherhood" also extremely true

"it's misogynist to dislike a specific character who happens to be a mother" you have to provide some more analysis if you want to make an argument, otherwise you're just kind of like, the equivalent of a toddler putting their hands over their eyes and thinking people can't see you; also you better have a perfect track record of stanning characters who are mothers yourself if a single character can make or break this.

[sunnydbeam]

Biohazard knows about robotics? Could he build a new body for himself if he had the right materials? 😯

He knows about robotics (sort of), mechanics, and other things because he used to be a maintenance robot. Biohazard was programmed to be able to repair all these things, especially heavy machinery. He also knows about engineering and nuclear physics

As for the other question… Yeah, he could build a body for himself, probably, but… that's as far as it goes. For obvious reasons, he's incapable of transferring himself to the spare body, and besides, he doesn't know about coding

[homunculus-argument]

Any time you come across a post that says something along the lines of "most people are/have/experience" about something that has never happened to you, that isn't you, or that you don't have, and you want to swoop in to inform them that this is incorrect because you have been excluded from this sentence, consider asking yourself:

Are you 'most people'?

Due to the way that language works, it is literally impossible to form a sentence that encompasses every single possible scenario of what is capable of existing. Generalisations are an inevitable part of making language function. If a statement is talking about people in general, it's safer to assume that they're only talking about the statistical majority of people and not every single individual specific case, and if it does not apply to your own individual specific case, it is entirely possible to just conclude that you are not the statistically most common case.

If someone makes a post like "why do people keep memeing about ginger men being ugly, like 60% of them would look like fucking viking gods if they grew their beards and hair out", and that isn't your personal experience, it's good to consider that perhaps you are simply not a part of the 60%. You do not need to pop in to say

"What about me? I don't look like that and I have no norse ancestry. I don't know how generalisations or statistics work, so why am I being excluded from the majority, as the literally only redheaded 25% asian mestizo I know of?"

[unopenablebox]

incapable of responding to a lot of Organizing Language or Post Shaming People Into Donations language as anything other than like. this person respects me so little, or else has so little real justification for what they're doing, that they'd rather blatantly try to manipulate me without ever trying to address me as a person than just explain their issue directly

extra unfortunate bc i know people do this even to people they have every reason to believe just agree with their actual issue, because i had to endure people trying to Sales Tactics me into supporting the union i organized, and yet i still am just unable to respond well to it at any time. if it sounds like it might actually be important and real i usually try to find some other source on the thing that isn't talking like they're trying to maliciously hack my brain

[crescentfool]

the explosher incident (based on a true story)

bonus under the cut

cars tier list... LOL

[aroaceleovaldez]

out of curiosity, because i like random statistics and data collection - would anybody be interested if i made a blog in the style of those "do you like this song" blogs except it runs polls on submitted riordanverse ships? like people can submit whatever riordanverse ship and then people vote on it and then we tally up all the stats to see like, fandom's most liked or disliked ship(s), most neutral ships, most voted ships, ships with the best and worst ratios of like-dislike, etc etc.