14 ms·

Sure, but then a conservative outcry is guaranteed: "Everybody can see that blacks are more criminal, the statistics show it clearly. But now the government is

Sure, but then a conservative outcry is guaranteed: "Everybody can see that blacks are more criminal, the statistics show it clearly. But now the government is trying to hide it by gaming the data!" As the public doesn't understand statistics it would be easy to make that claim a truth by repeating it a few times.

zaarn 8y ago
Everyone manipulates statistics in their favor, be that to support a claim ("the numbers say that if we do X then Y", guns/less gun deaths, social healthcare/improve quality of life) or to cause outcry ("you can't say X is/are/has Y, the numbers are Z", gender A/higher standard deviation for Q/sexist, monopolies/damaging/biased) regardless of the side of politics you are on in the US. Statistics are hard and the implications of some result are sometimes not intuitive. People don't care about what a standard deviation is, they just want more standard deviation than the other people over there because that makes them better.
darawk 8y ago
I'm not sure what your point is here: "Sometimes people lie or obfuscate...therefore let's not bother with the truth" ?
- bildung 8y ago
  More like: "In a political context gathering data is not at all a guaranteed way to get further to the truth." I don't want to make a case for dismissing an empirical approach per se! An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > More like: "In a political context gathering data is not at all a guaranteed way to get further to the truth." It's not guaranteed, no. But it's the only way we have any hope of it. > An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered. Is that actually true, though? I'm not familiar with the figures, but it's not unreasonable to imagine there may genuinely be more violent incidents among migrants from a war torn region like that. There were certainly serious cultural assimilation problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
  - 08-15 8y ago
    > But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too Not deadly knife fights, though. We don't want to erase the difference between brutal murder (25 stab wounds) and "a scuffle", do we?
    - bildung 8y ago
      Well, this isn't about murder. Murder rates didn't raise, but statistics for scuffles did. In both cases this is about crimes among immigrants, though, not about crimes of immigrants against Germans.
      - 08-15 8y ago
        > In both cases this is about crimes among immigrants, though Does that make it less of a problem?
        8y ago

zaarn 8y ago

Everyone manipulates statistics in their favor, be that to support a claim ("the numbers say that if we do X then Y", guns/less gun deaths, social healthcare/improve quality of life) or to cause outcry ("you can't say X is/are/has Y, the numbers are Z", gender A/higher standard deviation for Q/sexist, monopolies/damaging/biased) regardless of the side of politics you are on in the US. Statistics are hard and the implications of some result are sometimes not intuitive. People don't care about what a standard deviation is, they just want more standard deviation than the other people over there because that makes them better.

darawk 8y ago

I'm not sure what your point is here: "Sometimes people lie or obfuscate...therefore let's not bother with the truth" ?

bildung 8y ago
More like: "In a political context gathering data is not at all a guaranteed way to get further to the truth." I don't want to make a case for dismissing an empirical approach per se! An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered.
- darawk 8y ago
  > More like: "In a political context gathering data is not at all a guaranteed way to get further to the truth." It's not guaranteed, no. But it's the only way we have any hope of it. > An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered. Is that actually true, though? I'm not familiar with the figures, but it's not unreasonable to imagine there may genuinely be more violent incidents among migrants from a war torn region like that. There were certainly serious cultural assimilation problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
- 08-15 8y ago
  > But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too Not deadly knife fights, though. We don't want to erase the difference between brutal murder (25 stab wounds) and "a scuffle", do we?
  - bildung 8y ago
    Well, this isn't about murder. Murder rates didn't raise, but statistics for scuffles did. In both cases this is about crimes among immigrants, though, not about crimes of immigrants against Germans.
    - 08-15 8y ago
      > In both cases this is about crimes among immigrants, though Does that make it less of a problem?
      - 8y ago