I’ve decided to try my hand as a culture critic. There’s no way I was going to pay to see the new Barbie movie in the cinemas, so this is a somewhat belated review. There are spoilers ahead.
It’s one of the first major topics you learn about when taking statistics class. In essence, it allows you to model the mean of a response variable \( y_i \) as depending on some explanatory variables \( x_i \), where the subscript \( i = 1…n \) labels different observations. More concretely,
\[y = X \beta + \epsilon, \tag{1}\]In a previous post, I discussed population ethics and perhaps its foremost unsolved problem, the repugnant conclusion. To recap, the basic idea is that if you believe a small loss in quality of life for a population can be compensated by adding some number of people with lives worth living, then applying the same reasoning repeatedly leads to the conclusion that there is some enormous number of people all leading lives barely worth living that would be preferable to e.g. one billion people all living superlative lives. That seems rather unpalatable to most people.
In November 2021, I was invited by Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) to give a talk as part of a public webinar on vaccine safety. One of the goals of this webinar was to allow members of the public to ask questions and interact with professionals carrying out research in this area.
Population ethics is a subfield of philosophy that attempts to sensibly compare two populations that may differ in size and material circumstances, and decide which state of the world is better. That is, if we had the choice between one of these states being a reality, which should we choose?