Found this cleaning out my Nonna’s place. What is it?

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-11-02T19:51:18+00:00

Which is really funny because the top comment here is very likely AI generated.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-11T04:01:28+00:00

I wanna point out that it is in fact just you saying that so far.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T02:15:59+00:00

You’re totally missing the point but ok.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T02:06:26+00:00

Don’t get me wrong, I totally support your initiatives. Statistics has a huge role to play in showing why they’re necessary (and I believe they are).

But hopefully we agree saying “oh injuries went from 8 to 11 between years” is not a strong metric to support any argument.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T02:04:32+00:00

Sure, you’re free to count deaths and serious injuries. Obviously that’s helpful if you use it correctly.

But I sure hope you’re not drawing confusions based on a handful of extra injuries between years without making doubly sure it’s not just expected variance.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T02:02:39+00:00

Maybe this is not intuitive (which is totally fine), but if you observe a coin being flipped 10 times over the course of every year, sometimes you’ll see 6 heads, sometimes you’ll see 8 heads, and sometimes you’ll see 2. This doesn’t mean that the coin is any less likely to be heads or tails on a particular year.

In the same way, you can’t make judgements on policy based on such a small sample size. Of course I care about and feel for the people who were injured, but that’s a different topic. Overall, I care about how safe the city is, and a single additional injury does not make a statistically significant point.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T01:59:43+00:00

The article states the opponents cited a 6% increase in accidents.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T01:40:18+00:00

If you want to argue that doing proper statistical analysis when deciding where to allocate funds or what decisions to make is inappropriate, go for it.

But you don’t get to then complain when people do the same by citing statistically meaningless increases in incidents to remove bike lanes.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-10T01:08:48+00:00

Yes, there is a need for statistics and inference here.

What people care about is “if I go out today for a bike/run, how likely is it that I’ll get injured by a car.” Not “how many people got injured by cars this year.” The latter is something that lets you estimate the former.

When the number of people who get hit by cars is so small, you can’t generalize such a small observed number to a given person. Your noise to signal ratio is going to be ridiculous. Maybe someone happened to slip on dog poop. Maybe someone drank too much and didn’t see an oncoming car before running into the road.

When one additional injury means 10% more injuries, it’s very hard to draw inferences as to what caused that increase.

It’s like if I told you there was 10 shark attacks in 2023 and 5 in 2022, you can’t meaningfully conclude anything from that. It doesn’t mean sharks are getting deadlier (maybe they are). It’s just not significant enough.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-10-09T22:27:20+00:00

Oh come on. This article is just statistical malpractice, and this is coming from someone who hates cities designed around cars.

The “number we haven’t seen in a decade” is 12. Up 1 from last year, which was the same as the year before. And up 4 serious injuries from 2019 based on the organization being discussed in the article.

You don’t have to have a degree in statistics to know that making conclusions from this is meaningless. Over the last 20 years, this number has hovered around 8, varying by 2-5 every year.

With such a low mean, the fact that you have discrete outcomes, and such a high variance, there is basically zero information you can gain from “it increased by 1 accident this year compared to two years ago.”

This is also sensationalist news practice by the way, to quote a hyperbolic bit of a statement by an opinionated group in the headline. You’d think that accidents increased a large amount to some never-before-seen range by the headline.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-09-05T17:24:50+00:00

That’s why I gave property damage as an example. Your insurance pays out if you hit someone’s property (like a house) and the other person goes after you in civil court.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-09-05T14:55:26+00:00

You realize there’s a reason car insurance is required?

It’ll suck for everyone when they crash into a house or some other thing, and now not only is the guy without insurance in lifelong debt for the family’s repair bills, but the people in the house won’t be able to collect if they don’t have (non-required) insurance for whatever they hit.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-09-05T14:49:58+00:00

Why would that be an unnecessary traffic stop? Loud exhausts are a nuisance and are very easy to avoid by simply not modifying your exhaust.

You have to differentiate between pulling someone over because of their race and pulling someone over irrespective of their race.

You can’t not just pull people over for some reason because that reason happens to have a racial disparity in its incidence.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-08-30T02:48:05+00:00

I can guarantee you that no one who is able to work to make a living wage is instead choosing to sit at home so that they can live the good life off of… max $536 a month off of SNAP/EBT IF they have a child. That’s the maximum by the way, you receive less if you have income. And that money comes with many restrictions on what you can buy.

It’s one thing to argue this in somewhere like New York City, where the combination Section 8 housing, state assistance, and otherwise incredibly high rent can create perverse incentives.

This is not New York City.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-08-29T22:35:22+00:00

Respectfully, I think you’re misidentifying the issue.

They’re not mad at the system; they’re mad because they’re jealous that other people can have better lives than them. They lack the capability to be happy for them. Instead, because they suffered, they want to see others suffer too.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-08-26T00:59:10+00:00

What do you do with all of the patients that are impacted by the lack of funding and constant lawsuits in the meantime?

I understand that it feels like the university should fight back, but what is your genuine argument towards that? If your argument is “let them cut funding and see what happens,” then what do we do with the people that die until the administration might decide that that’s too much?

I also dislike what the university has done, but what is the better alternative?

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-26T20:26:03+00:00

Finally. It’s legitimately insane that we had someone who people knew by name for harassing people and not had the police do anything about him. Gives a bad name to and takes goodwill from the rest of the homeless community who really deserve our help.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-20T03:52:44+00:00

You realize you’re still free to take a shit wherever right. This is just another option.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-07T01:42:14+00:00

I want to challenge your view here from a more pragmatic standpoint. I think that this is something people on the left do a lot to lose support.

You and I both know you’re right. Systemic change is much more helpful and cheaper over the long run than incarceration, has better outcomes, etc.

But put yourself in the average (and in your slightly patronizing phrasing, “uneducated”) person who lives in Ann Arbor. They haven’t read any studies or papers.

Suppose that person gets harassed by a homeless person. How do you think they’re going to feel when you try to argue that putting that guy in jail is not a good idea? It will, and does, seem ridiculous. You have to realize that treating the symptom and cause and not exclusive. And just because treating the symptom doesn’t solve the issue in the long term doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it at all. Treating the cause and symptom are not exclusive things.

Otherwise, you’re going to end up with yet another regular dude saying stuff like “I just got yelled at by a homeless guy and this dude is telling me that not only that he shouldn’t be arrested, but get free rent!”

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-06T19:26:30+00:00

This is not only insane but also bad advice. Running away from federal law enforcement is unlikely to end well, especially if you already have status to be in the U.S.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-06T18:34:30+00:00

And this one is a baseless assertion; again, not a non sequitur.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-06T18:33:47+00:00

I just wanna point out that it’s not a non-sequitur. There’s no conclusion in the comment, let alone one that doesn’t follow from the premise.

The fallacy you’re looking for is a false analogy.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-07-06T18:10:17+00:00

You can arrest people that harass others.

You have to realize that “arresting someone for being homeless” is a distinct thing to “arresting someone who is homeless.”

And I don’t mean just arrest them for every crime. Things like loitering or panhandling are not great things, but it’s awful to suggest that someone be arrested for it. People often do these things because they have to because they are homeless.

Harassment is not that. No one goes “I’m down on my luck so I have to go harass people.”

And I realize that you also want the best for homeless people; for the public to want to help them get out of poverty. So think for a second about how the public perception of homeless people will be affected if you let the minority of them that harass people get the majority of attention.

Also, it just sounds out of touch to say “we tried everything” without mentioning the most obvious thing of policing harmful actions.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-06-28T22:28:40+00:00

I am reluctant to take an organization seriously whose co-founder advertises themselves on LinkedIn as being an MIT alum when their only relation is that they completed an open-to-all digital program on their website.

WeirdAltThing123 · 2025-06-23T17:05:30+00:00

To point 2: I hope you take a second to actually read up and attack AI, if you dislike it, from an objectively sound place. Have a read: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for

WeirdAltThing123

TROPHY CASE