Top Tweets: 4 May 2021

Critical thinking, no world for women, Kurz Gesagt, moonbows, and survivorship bias

I’m planning on doing a weekly post on the best tweets and Twitter threads that I come across in the week. It should be a short, light read but hopefully interesting and insightful.

Carl T. Bergstrom @CT_Bergstrom

1. Today’s antivax propaganda comes from a….vaccine manufacturer? Unfortunately, yes. The manufacturer of the Sputnik V vaccine is tweeting absolutely nonsense statistics in an effort to question the safety record of its competitors.

⬆This is a masterclass in critical thinking. The manufacturer of the Sputnik V vaccine put out a data-based comparison showing how the other vaccines were resulting in more deaths than Sputnik V. However, Carl Bergstrom (author of Calling Bullshit, an excellent book on critical thinking in the age of misinformation) dissects the claim and points of 5 different ways in which the claim is misleading.

Per Axbom @axbom

In 2012 a Swedish researcher, Anna Carlsson, created the first prototype of a crash test dummy with a female body shape. This after it was found that women had a 47% higher chance of suffering serious injuries in car crashes.

cnet.comWorld gets first female crash test dummyA researcher in Sweden has created a prototype of the world’s first female crash test dummy.

Navin Kabra @NGKabra

The world is designed mostly keeping in mind the average white male. This causes lots of problems for women (eg AC in office is too cold for the average woman). See quoted thread, and also this book theguardian.com/books/2019/feb… (via @sarikaphatak)

Karly @kbarley66

Our world was not built for women. Someone could probably write a book about this, but here are a few examples I've been thinking about recently: 1/

⬆The world isn’t built for women. Literally. Read the article linked in the second tweet for more. There’s an entire book on this topic.

Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

Insane fact from @Kurz_Gesagt’s latest: It takes a googol years for a supermassive black hole to decay. If you had an hourglass w/ a grain of sand for every particle in the universe, and 1 grain fell every billion years, when it ran out you’d be < 1% thru the black hole’s life.

⬆While the fact in this tweet is cute, I really wanted to talk about Kurz Gesagt. How many of you know about the Kurz Gesagt YouTube channel? (“Sciency videos made with love, a lot of time and after effects.”) Well, I talk to a lot of kids these days, and almost all of them know about Kurz Gesagt, and many of them follow it regularly. I thought you should know that.

Shashikant Kore @kshashi

7 yo - "Can you see a rainbow in moonlight?" Turns out the answer is yes. It's called moonbow and it usually appears white because it's too faint.

en.wikipedia.orgMoonbow - Wikipedia

⬆Did you know that moon rainbows exist?

New to Some

There are some facts/principles/concepts that are generally known to a number of people but not necessarily all. So often, people mention them without an explanation, and the ones who know understand what’s going on while the ones who don’t are lost.

For example, consider the tweet below. From the number of retweets and likes, it is clear that many people _got_ it. But if you don’t know what the image is referring to, the tweet makes no sense.

Whenever I run into a reference like this, I will put it in this section, in the hope that at least a few new people will be introduced to an awesome fact.

Health Nerd @GidMK

"I got COVID-19 and it was fine"

The tweet above is a reference to this incident from World War 2. If you still don’t understand it, please don’t hesitate to ask me and I’ll be happy to explain.

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