Ontario Helmet Law being pushed through

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:44:42 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 02:51:06 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Would you care to try the "mini-minded" test?

Is that where we try to emulate your mini-mind?

Is that the best you can do? You go back into your timeout,
little boy. Your remaining messages today will be ignored.

Translation: Laa laa I'm not listening. As usual.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:50:36 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Bill, I'd be extremely happy to have you conduct such a test. What
we'll learn is this: After a year, a few thousand helmets will have a
few thousand empty data recorders, since there will have been
approximately zero crashes. And honest reporting of results would
show that a few thousand helmets did no good at all.

Good. Have at it. Continue the tests until you get some number of
crashes. The purpose of the tests is to measure what happens in a
fall, not to measure the risk of an accident.

Close, but no cigar. Actually it is the helmet proponents who should
be conducting research, since real-world evidence from whole
populations and time series resolutely refuses to back the tiny
hospital-based studies on which their promotion is founded. They are,
after all, the ones selling product.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:36:48 -0800, Erik Freitag
wrote in message
:

[of "Zaumen the Infallible"]

Ooops - I made a mistake. What I meant to say was "as far as I can
tell, you don't think you've ever made a mistake"

Ah, but the original version was a great example of irony :-)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:43:35 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

I take it, Frank, that you have never seen the "employee evaluation
form" that, under "Communications Skills" lists "Talks to God" as a 1,
"Argues with himself" as a 4, and "Loses arguments with himself" as a
5.

I make your score 6: loses every argument he engages in. HTH.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 06:21:38 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

If you think a helmet is going to make my take extra risks on a bike,
you are simply out of your mind.

Nobody believes in risk compensation. That's why it happens.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 03:01:44 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Back to the cooler for you, Guy.

Thanks for the offer, Bill, but I am drinking real ale at the moment,
which is not kept in the cooler.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 19:40:22 -0800, Benjamin Lewis
wrote in message :

When I started posting here several years ago I thought there
were good reasons to wear a helmet, and studies that backed this up. After
reading all the studies I've found, I'm now mostly convinced otherwise.

aol Me too /aol

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:15:44 GMT, "Steven M. Scharf"
wrote in message
et:

Yeah, that must be it.
Well at least you realize it now. That is a good first step.

Check your dictionary under "irony".

I wasn't talking about your proposed experiment. I wonder what you think
Frank et al. have to gain by their "propaganda".

It is similar to evangelists. It isn't sufficient that they themselves
believe something for which no evidence exists, they must convince
everyone else to believe as well.

What astonishes me is that you can post this, apparently sincerely
believing that this is a characterisation of the helmet sceptics, when
the best examples of religious behaviour - in fact probably the only
examples - are to be found among the helmet zealots. Why do you think
they are often referred to as True Believers?

That could be your goal for the second step. Learn to think critically.

Why do you think so many people have converted from strongly
pro-helmet to various shades of scepticism as a result of helmet
threads? It is exposure to balancing data, and discovering the flaws
in the strictly limited types of study which propose benefit, which
amounts to the dawn of critical thinking.

But of course we know that Scharf's version of critical thinking is to
discount evidence from those who disagree. So maybe that explains
everything.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 05:11:04 GMT, "Steven M. Scharf"
wrote in message
et:

I'm not sure what you believe their motivation is, then. Malicious desire
to get innocent people killed?

Surely you understand their motivation.

Yes, perfectly. The motivation, in my case at least, is to point out
that "informed choice" means choice informed by more than zealous
promotion of product based on tiny studies which share common flaws.

I have been told by a leading helmet promoter that my discussion of
the failure of helmets to result in reductions in injuries and
fatalities at he population level is "interfering with people making
an informed choice" - they apparently think, as Scharf evidently does,
that "informed" means "informed solely by facts which agree with a
premise". That is not my definition.

I am also motivated by a genuine love of cycling. Helmet promotion
damages cycling. The evidence for this is strong, even where
promotion is not extended to compulsion. It requires, in order to be
effective, the promotion of the false idea of cycling as an unusually
dangerous activity.

I have just been watching a classic TV series from the early 1980s.
It is full of people of all ages riding bikes - this is not subject
matter, it's just how they happen to get around. None of them are
wearing foam hats. None of them get killed. Nobody thinks it's
dangerous.

There is a class of people who simply cannot rest when actions they
take, or products they use, are not adopted by everyone else. It makes
them look bad (or so they believe) when others take safety precautions
that they believe are unneccessary.

If they do not use a helmet, then they must justify this by promoting
the fallacy that helmet use has no effect on injuries or fatalities.

Unfortunately, they have to deal with a plethora of studies that prove
that, when an accident occurs, a helmet greatly reduces the risk of
injury or death.

The way they approach this is two-fold. First, they ignore the studies,
and change the premise. Second they create new myths such as the one
that helmet wearers are four times as likely to be involved in
accidents. You may have also seen the myth about rotational injuries.
Since they have no proof to support their myths, they try to turn the
whole thing around and demand proof that the myths that they created are
not true. Surely you've seen the endless demands for citations!

The helmet debate is hardly the only issue where they employ these
tactics. Sadly, some people appear to fall for their fallacies.

There is a class of people who simply cannot rest when actions they
take, or products they use, are not adopted by everyone else. It makes
them look bad (or so they believe) when others fail to take safety
precautions that they believe are necessary.

If they use a helmet, then they must justify this by promoting the
fallacy that helmet use has a massive effect on injuries or
fatalities.

Unfortunately, they have to deal with a plethora of studies that prove
that, overall, a helmet makes no difference to the risk of serious
injury or death.

The way they approach this is two-fold. First, they ignore the
studies, and change the premise. Second they create new myths such as
the one that bicycling is inherently dangerous. You may have also seen
the facts about rotational injuries. Since they have no proof to
support their myths, they try to turn the whole thing around and
demand proof that the myths that they created are not true. Surely
you've seen the endless demands for citations!

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 06:21:54 GMT, "Steven M. Scharf"
wrote in message
. net:

Benjamin asked what Frank's motivation is, sarcastically inquiring if it
was a malicious desire to get innocent people killed, and implying that
there could not possibly be any other motivation.

And your reply, as usual, took all the failings of the helmet zealot
and applied them to the sceptic, as though the helmet zealot is immune
from such flaws.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound