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this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a zillion other stats came up, because th
by tenacious_tuna 3y ago
this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a zillion other stats came up, because the officers were fudging the classifications of the crimes to try and achieve the metric goal.
Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.
- phpisthebest 3y agoLike Idiotacracy, I believe the Wire is more Truth than fiction
- dredmorbius 3y agoDavid Simon discusses this point specifically in a 2008 lecture at UC Berkeley titled "The Audacity of Despair": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw> The statistics discussion begins at about 8 minutes, and continues for much of the discussion and Q&A. I'd seen that long before watching The Wire itself, and in fact the lecture was a large part of the reason I wanted to watch the series. (Poor quality audio and a very distracting speaking manner. Still very much worth listening to.)