2 ms·
Do you think the individuals that choose to go to the media and speak negatively of him are an unbiased sample of all of the individuals he has meaningfully eng
by rjf72 7y ago
Do you think the individuals that choose to go to the media and speak negatively of him are an unbiased sample of all of the individuals he has meaningfully engaged with through the years? This is the problem with basing your perception of reality on the media. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news. If all you have to rely for your characterization of "other" people is the media then you'd suddenly think there was a massive epidemic of men running around biting dogs! Won't anybody think of the puppies!? We need to urgently pass anti-dog biting laws!
As one example of this that we can quantify, a major issue in the US is "responsible gun control" to combat an epidemic of homicide and violence driven largely by high powered "assault rifles." In quotes there since an assault rifle entails selective fire, generally between full and semi automatic - those weapons are already illegal. Anyhow, let's test this against the data. In the US in 2016 there were 11,004 firearm homicides. [1] How many of these were caused by rifles? The answer is 374, about 3%. Nearly all of our gun crime is driven by cheap little pistols. But "assault rifles" make much better media and sound scary, so it results in a grossly misinformed public who think there's some massive epidemic of "assault rifle" driven homicide.
[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-4.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...