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Good to know I got only a 1 in 1000 chance of dying because Americans are so hyped up on fake maga tough guy takes that we can't agree to hold police accountabl

• vba616 4y ago
  That's not what I was trying to communicate. I know I can't win the argument you'd like to start about the absolute risk and whether it's tolerable. I don't want to! My point was about the variance, and false confidence that two small rates are truly different. Even when one is zero, so the other is infinity percent larger. It's not that 1/1000 is "low" or "high" in terms of human cost - that is in the eye of the beholder. The point is that the frequency of rare events is highly sensitive to random chance, and so even with hypothetical perfect records you can't pretend different numbers are necessarily different rates. Much less if you guess at numbers based on prejudices. "How to Lie With Statistics" desperately needs a sequel.