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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Yes, less fireflies and ladybugs, yet plenty of bloody tiger mosquitoes... I’d say is a typical case of “half chicken statistics”

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Yes, number of aphids goes up, number of butterflies goes down. Conclusion: no net change.

The study has been criticised by German scientists for this reason. With rather drastic words, e.g. "I don't understand how a paper with such obvious weaknesses can pass through the peer reviewing process" and "This paper is not a good example for scientific best practices".

Yeah, this ought to be the top thread ;)

A few careers ago, some agribusiness dude asked me why I opposed the introduction of nonnative species, given that I was concerned about biodiversity loss.

I'm not familiar with the phrase "half chicken statistics", and a basic google search was unhelpful. What does that generally refer to?

I'm guessing stats where the basic question doesn't reflect reality. "If a chicken and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three chickens lay in thirty days".

It's a famous saying in in Italy on the problem of losing information when averaging

"If one person eats a chicken and another person doesn't eat anything, on average they both ate half a chicken"

Or in a similar way something like:

"If I eat two chickens and you eat none, statistically we both ate one"

This reminds me of this old joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089588

In Poland we use "on average, me and my dog have three legs"

In Latvia, we say "on average, all have no potato." Then we are sad.

I dunno, I saw lots of potatoes in Riga!! :)

The saying dates back to before the discovery of the New World, when in fact no one in Latvia had potatoes.

The rest is only hallucination from malnutrition and death

In America we have: "The man who has feet in the freezer, and his head in the oven, on average feels fine!"

An average human only has one testicle.

Not sure where I heard that.

The average male human has less than two testicles.

Also, the average human has less than two legs and less than two arms.

To expand, it comes originally from a poem from Trilussa[0], a poet which wrote satirical poems in the Roman dialect. I'm afraid they lose a lot in translation.

[0] http://www.fotografi.org/studi_settore/polli_di_trilussa.htm

Can you link to the huge, comprehensive studies spanning the entire US that show a large decline in fireflies and ladybugs?

Agreed, I think that a lot of info gets lost by over-aggregating and by over-summarizing

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