Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics.
If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%.
if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%.
thats how that works.

Wow I don’t understand math at all
‘if you have a baby after 35, the chance of deformities goes up by 100%’ is a line I hear alot.
It goes up from .5% to 1%
I think my brain just stopped working

100% is just another way of saying twice more likely. So 100% more basically means multiply the number you do have by 2.
Imagine how many woman are scared to have kids because of that statistic

This is why I took stats instead of calc. Because I don’t build engineer bridges in my everyday life but I sure do read studies that affect how I might live my life if I misinterpret them.
I’m terrible at numbers and math but I knew this and I really take it for granted. The average person definitely assumes, quite understandably, that “600% INCREASE!!!” must always mean a whole lot even if it literally only means that one of something is now six of something.
Politicians probably take a shitload of advantage of this confusion.
just remember that increased BY and increased TO are very different things.
Oh god I didn’t even think about that whole other layer of confusion.
Yeah if you’ve got 100 people and one of them is sick, that’s 1% of them who are sick, so if it “increased BY 100%” then that means now two people are sick.
If it’s “increased TO 100%” then all 100 people are sick.
Reblogging again for that last addition.
Illustration from a Cinderella ’s version called “Mozzarella” by Phoebe Wahl
Text transcription for easier reading:
Usually I wouldn't address stuff like this but I feel like it as a conversation is bigger than me. I'm not gay; but I think the culture of trying to "find" some kind of hidden trait or behavior that a closeted person "let slip" is very dangerous. Overanalyzing someone's behavior in an attempt to "catch" them directly contributes to the anxiety a lot of queer and queer questioning people feel when they fear living in their truth. It makes the most pedestrian of conversations and interactions in spaces feel less safe for our gay brothers and sisters and those may be questioning. It also reinforces an archetype many straight men have to live under that is often times unrealistic, less free, and limits individual expression.
I've been very clear about the intentionality I try to put into using my platform to push back against those archetypes every chance that I get. Being straight doesn't look one way. Being gay doesn't look one way. And what may seem like harmless fun and conversation may actually be sending a dangerous message to those struggling with real issues. I refuse to inadvertently contribute to that message. Happy Pride to all of my queer and questioning brothers, sisters, and individuals. I pray that you feel seen in ways that make you feel safe in the celebration that is this month. As an ally I continue to be committed to assisting in that where I can and helping to cultivate a future where we are all accepted and given permission to be ourselves.
TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS, EVERYBODY
AND HIS BROTHER TYREL, EVERYBODY
Is he wrong, tho?
‘Night Clocks’ by Lisa Benson
‘The Little Mermaid’ by Edmund Dulac, 1911
I feel bad responding to a very beautiful, poetically written ventpost with prosaic advice, but I'm going to say this:
Resilience is a skill. Being able to shrug things off is a skill. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can do something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that's a skill.
It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.
unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don't hurt anymore.
if you're highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't.
if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it's goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it's going to be a bitch to pick it up.
if you learnt "the world is scary and out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" (or "showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once", or "minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren't going perfectly then you're about to suffer", or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn't work like that any more is hard and it hurts. Unless you're really good at figuring out what you're thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.
You're not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that's as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it's cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.
....But adults learn Russian every day. Adults teach themselves Russian every day.
You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.
you are not doomed to get hit by everything that happens to you like it's a truck forever.
The Children of Lir (2022)