Magical thinking and irrational ideas concerning health

[PairO'Dice Lost]

How do you not deliberately misunderstand me when you ignore my Japan example? OK, maybe you aren't able to transfer from one example to another. So here's an abstract.

I was sticking with the same example because it hasn't been resolved to anyone's satisfaction. If you're not familiar with the "Gish gallop", it's an argumentative strategy when someone tosses out a point and asks for someone else to refute it, then when that argument looks like it's not going the way they'd like they toss out another one, then another and another and another, and claims "victory" because the other person hasn't refuted all their points.

Not that I'm accusing you of doing that deliberately, but just ignoring a point and moving on and then accusing others of misunderstanding when they don't ignore the point isn't very good discussion etiquette.

Ah yes, the infinite monkeys. *facepalm*

Dismissing statistics as "the infinite monkeys" is not productive when (A) dealing with large numbers of events usually requires statistical analysis to make sense of things, (B) it does a good job of explaining the seemingly inexplicable, and (C) you've already admitted that you're bad at math and therefore aren't at all unbiased in this area. Statistics works, the argument from incredulity doesn't.

Yes but not good enough to use as a base for any academic work, at least when I recently took some UNI courses here we were highly discouraged to use it as a base for any work we did as even 86% is not reliable enough.

Wikipedia cites its sources, which you can check if you're not certain of a quote's validity. Some of the opposition to Wikipedia by professors of more advanced classes makes sense (e.g. dropping the Adiabatic theorem on someone via Wikipedia is much more confusing than a textbook explanation), but for less complex subjects the opposition mostly seems to boil down to "It's not in a textbook, therefore it's unreliable" despite the fact that for such introductory material the Wikipedia version is usually essentially the same, if not more up-to-date and better explained.

For this debate in particular, I'd say citing Wikipedia for brief records of events, introductory science and mathematics, and basic logical reasoning is perfectly reasonable.