i was not disparaging it at all, but pointing out how you need many more factors to be accurate. and that using one stat number is not sufficient for an over all game plan. no where did i say it was worthless but that in order guage something accurately more info is needed.

Plenty of people would disagree with you. I'd surmise that you could explain 50% of the variation in player quality (as determined by win rate) with just VPIP, which is quite good by modeling standards. Every additional parameter is marginally less important and therefore less valuable. Look up Akaike Information Criteria if you're interested.

again, i am not confusing it at all. you are misunderstanding me. the fact is that when talking in general terms correlation does have a connotative meaning that does imply a relationship.

What do you think that most people take away from a study like this? certainly they do not look at it through the eyes of a statistician.

but look at it to mean that either religion makes you dumb or that only dumb people could believe in religion.

so yes, i understand your point, but you are not listening to mine. studies like this are not used to show anything to statisticians who comprehend what this means, but to try a use data to pull the proverbial wool over the publics eyes and prove what ever point they were trying to make.

you cannot honestly tell me that a study like this was done for any other reason than to prove an already preconcieved notion that was in someone's head and used completely out of context. What actual good comes from something like this? some guy who hated religion said to himself, "i bet only dumb people are religious, i'll do a study to prove this point" and the rest follows.

so you would say that a blanket statement can be made about this?

would you say the same thing about 3bet%? can you determin everything that you need to know based on that stat?

i do not think you get the point that i was making.

Well, some people believe polling is done to understand how people feel about issues, and creationism is an important one, since creationists continue to try to dictate K-12 curricula in the US. If you really think the Gallop, the largest polling company in the US, did a poll to prove a point and get a citation on Wikipedia, that's not just cynical, that's silly. They were paid to do that poll just like all the others they do.

I get exactly the point you're making. You suggest that you need a LOT of information to make good decisions. I disagree. You can make good (but imperfect) decisions with a minimum of data, if it's the right data. Why do you think VPIP is the first number in a HUD?

3bet% is informative, but much less so than VPIP. It might explain 20% (guess) of variance in bb/100 by itself. BUT it would probably only explain 10% additional variance when combined with VPIP. DUCY?

if you think that a study like this was just done for pure informational purposes and had 0 alterior motive, then you are just being naive.

exactly

Evidence, please.

You're claiming that the GSS is conducted under an ulterior atheist motive? Really?

You mean compare biblical literalism to the difference in the IQ measures right? I also think that would be interesting. Probably would work best to control for absolute IQ level, since I think dumber people will tend to overestimate their IQ more, regardless of their religious beliefs.

that is not what your link went to. your link was exactly what i have been talking about.

this guy had a motive to begin with.

The guy did not conduct the studies!!

If you think his biases somehow came through in reporting data from other studies, then feel free to point out what he did incorrectly. A bunch of hand waving about how this guy expected to find this correlation is irrelevant.

again you are not paying attention. first i did not say that he did anything incorrectly, but talked about his motivation to set something up like this.

try looking at all of the comments that follow. they all clap their hands at what they claim they all ready new, and i can assure you that by the tone of the comments what they thought they new was not a statistical correlation, but that religious people are dumb and no one that is smart would be fooled to believing something like that.

the motivation is everything. if you do not see it then it is simply because you like what a study like this implies, so you give it a pass.

Nothing ever written, no research ever performed, no idea ever conceived is done in a vacuum, ignoring prior biases and beliefs. To think so is naive. This is not the same as being objective/dispassionate/unbiased in one's methodology.

Do you seriously require me finding two examples of species that are within the same genus that are so vastly different that it would be insane to think that they evolved from one pair over a couple thousand years?

Do you REALLY not understand how ridiculous of a point this is? Basically, you are saying that because YOU do not understand statistics, that NOBODY understands statistics, everyone misuses them, they cannot be trusted, and they are by their very nature useless and misleading. No one is using them to BLINDLY prove a point...that is precisely the issue. They are using them to ILLUSTROUSLY prove a point.

Not everything you dont understand is witchcraft.

I didnt actually ever make that claim, but if thats the best counterargument you've got then I wish I had. You are chasing ghosts here. I could make all sorts of inferences and assertions based on the OBSERVED, REAL correlation between stupidity and religion. But those would just be my inferences and assertions. They might even be unsupported. What IS supported is that people who are stupid are more likely to be religious, and vice versa.

Sufficient for what? Accurate isnt some digital quality of the universe. Nothing is either "accurate" or "not accurate."

Which species of each genus? How do you define genus? IS it feasible for every extant species to have undergone sufficient speciation events (especially for those species-rich genera) in 2000 years to account for current levels of diversity?

''The Ararat Anomaly''......enough said.

"Purple monkey dishwasher"....enough said.

You are a ''troll'' and you are also officially 'Ignored'....enough said.

My original intention was not to defend the historicity of Noah's ark, but to bash pedantry. I have a visceral reaction to people trying to assert the impossible. In other areas of research people have learned to not do this. If the Bible debunkers made these sweeping pronouncements in any other area they'd be run out of the community on a rail.

How is the Bible bashing cottage industry able to produce such an endless string of immutable verdicts of impossibility? Based upon what? Situations in which the parameters can be interpreted various ways (the specifics of a story outline as told in an ancient tongue), where we have very little data concerning the historical circumstances, and where so-called scientists with little time, few resources, questionable expertise and no peer review or independent validating testing are falling over themselves pronouncing impossibility after impossibility.

It's junk science. And what purpose does it purport to serve? The Bible is the story of an Almighty God for whom all things are possible. What is even the point of demonstrating that some such event is empirically impossible? To show that you'd need a supernatural force? The whole point of the book is that there is supernatural force!

And when you look at the types of things they try to prove impossible, and why they're impossible...now that's tilting. Why not just point out Noah is purported to be 600 years old and leave it at that? Or that a supernatural man in the sky is purported to have been involved at all? Once a person believes in God, what's hard about believing anything else? That a man can't build a boat, or he can't catch a bee, or feed a horse?

It's all so stupid. People employing themselves in this way, spending good money and wasting their lives trying to "prove" these things are by definition idiots, imo.

You seem to be trying really hard to take away from the findings by this person and you are reaching for non existent manifestations of bias. The survey is clearly not biased. The regression analysis done by a separate party who obviously does have a bias against biblical literalists is using mathematical modeling techniques which are not biased. Unless you are accusing him of blatant data manipulation (either modification or exclusion of some data) then your arguments regarding bias is useless.

You also throughout this thread have attacked the use of statistical models and have asserted that you understand how they work. However, subsequent posts following that assertion have shown that you truly do not understand regression models.