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It isn’t cherry-picking to say “this European country has done better than <list of all European countries that are worse>”. The selection criteria is clear and
by irq11 6y ago
It isn’t cherry-picking to say “this European country has done better than <list of all European countries that are worse>”. The selection criteria is clear and consistent: you sort the countries and take the ones that are worse.
It’s cherry-picking to take two countries that did better, simply because you prefer that narrative.
- notacoward 6y ago> sort the countries and take the ones that are worse Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.
- irq11 6y agoThe term literally came from picking cherries. Observing where an item lies in a ranked list is no more or less biased than picking a median.
- cygx 6y agoFor reference, here's the list of major western European countries (population > 1M) ranked by deaths per capita attributed to COVID-19: Belgium Spain United Kingdom Italy Sweden France Netherlands Ireland Switzerland Portugal Germany Denmark Austria Finland Norway Greece "As good or better than most of western Europe" does not look like an accurate characterization of Sweden's position to me...
- irq11 6y agoI didn’t say that, so I’m not sure why you’re making the argument to me. Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are indeed worse off than Sweden, and it isn’t selective to point it out. That’s all I’m saying here.
- username90 6y agoSame list but with population >10M. Belgium Spain United Kingdom Italy Sweden France Netherlands Portugal Germany Greece So 4 countries worse and 5 better. If you count excess deaths then Netherlands is also worse than Sweden so 5 worse and 4 better. Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.
- cygx 6y agoAnyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense. If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants). So let's do that: Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe. For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52. [1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom