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Not really in the same vein, but I have noticed the following logical fallacy is extremely common. On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specif

Not really in the same vein, but I have noticed the following logical fallacy is extremely common. On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific case, X is more likely than Y. This is not true at all, and leads to some really dumb conclusions. Not a perfect example but : gun owners in the USA on average are more likely to hurt themselves with their firearm than successfully use the firearm on an intruder. Now, if you follow proper firearm practices, then your chance of hurting yourself is basically 0. This average number includes the vast swathe of people who really have no business owning a firearm. If you are educated and take it seriously, though, you won't hurt yourself. And yet this statistic has really stuck with people and I hear people use it all the time to assert that anyone that owns a gun is putting their own life at risk, regardless of how they treat the gun.

tunesmith 3y ago
That's generally the racial profiling fallacy, too. Applying demographic probabilities to the individual.
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  yeah absolutely. If there is not a term for that phenomenon more broadly there should be. Its basically just a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics that even people educated in statistics seem to fall for
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
techdmn 3y ago
I think it makes sense to want a study that controls for gun training and intelligence, I don't think it makes sense to reject data based conclusions due to anecdotal disagreement. My understanding is that a lot of those self-inflicted wounds are suicide attempts, which one would not expect to be influenced by firearm proficiency (except perhaps in success rate).
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  it would be affected by someones predisposition to depression and suicidal ideation though right? I tell you what - I will never commit suicide, and I will never accidentally harm myself with a gun. No amount of "studies" about the average gun owner are going to change those facts. You are rejecting reality by deferring to expertise.
alexpetralia 3y ago
I think this is basically Simpson's Paradox. If you take an average across the entire population, that is actually the average if you were to randomly select an individual from the population (i.e. the long-run value after repeated sampling). However, if you were to examine particular subgroups, they may wildly deviate from the average, and so in any particular subgroup, the mean is not at all like the population average. If you have more information on the particular subgroup you are sampling from, then you should of course use that information to estimate the relevant average. If you don't, or the claim you're making spans many comparable subgroups, then perhaps a broader average applies.
- lucas_membrane 3y ago
  I saw a report recently that said that a population study (from some country in Europe, IIRC) showed that people who are still getting their COVID vaccinations updated are subsequently having worse COVID experience than others. Unfortunately, there are three possible explanations for this that immediately come to mind: (1) The vaccine increases risk; (2) People have some way of inferring their need for vaccine, which the study could not or did not take into its analysis, and the vaccinated group was a self-selected high risk group; (3) The vaccinated group felt protected enough by the vaccine to eschew isolation and make itself a high risk group. Note that 2 of these work in one direction an 1 in the other, and that all three might simultaneously be true enough of some subset of the studied population to be significant in determining the study's results. Do science, but carry humility, especially about why people do anything, what that means, and what is unknowable within your context.
briantakita 3y ago
> On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific case, X is more likely than Y. I'll take this a bit further. X is more likely than Y so Y is not going to happen & we should not consider Y. There's a book, recommended by Bill Gates no less, "How to lie with statistics". From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics > Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do. I'll claim that statistics & even extracting quanta from qualia is going to have data loss from the sampling. So forecasting from statistics requires context on what is being forecasted.
bhpm 3y ago
The gun example suffers from a lack of nuance in risk quantification. Anyone who owns a gun is putting their own life at risk, because “basically zero” is not “zero.” So the statement is “If you own a gun, you are putting your life at risk” is technically true, it’s just not very useful. The way to overcome this is to start with the average risk and subtract from it by naming specific mitigations that must be in place to reduce risk. Unfortunately, it seems that in the US, there isn’t a voice of “responsible gun owners” in the conversation. There are only two voices: those who would ban them outright and those who would make any restriction illegal. By the way, the largest victim of gun violence in the US is gun owners due to suicide. It’s unclear what mitigations one could put in place to prevent that.
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  I don't really understand how suicide violence can be blamed on guns. Million ways to kill oneself that are easily accessible. At any rate I agree, the moderate educated gun owner is a majorly minority viewpoint for sure.
  - phatskat 3y ago
    > Million ways to kill oneself that are easily accessible. A key factor to look at when someone is experiencing suicidal ideation is to evaluate whether they have a concrete plan. Someone is much more likely to succeed or even attempt suicide if they have a thought out plan of actionable steps. Most non-gun methods I can think of off the top of my head come with risk factors that would require more complex planning. But, with easy access to a firearm, the planning becomes much simpler in many ways.
  - bhpm 3y ago
    Women are more likely to attempt suicide, and men are more likely to succeed. Gun ownership is overwhelmingly male.
    - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
      okay, your point?
petsfed 3y ago
I believe you're committing the no-true-scotsman rhetorical fallacy. Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't have easy access to guns. About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0]. If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people are not following those practices, in which case some other mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is necessary. I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't keep our firearms in our home. 0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...
- buttercraft 3y ago
  I would say that, yes, a HUGE number of gun owners fail basic gun safety. In my area, you do not have to demonstrate knowledge of firearms to own one. I've seen a lot of idiots on the range, and that's why I only go shooting with people I know and trust.
  - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    at my local range I have seen the following : - A man teaching his girlfriend to shoot a tech nine. She was holding it with her finger over the barrel and was moments away from firing before my dad notice and stopped her - A roughly 12 year old jumping out of a van, pulling a pistol directly from his waistband, and firing downrange without ever taking a safety off. Also most gun owners I know just keep their guns like, on a shelf somewhere, with the bullets either in the gun or nearby. So yeah there are a lot of people that don't use any brain cells whatsoever when handling firearms. Get your youtube algorithm to start serving you shorts from the hip-hop enthusiast gun-modification community, you'll see some real idiocy in short order.
eviks 3y ago
"If you follow" is a tautological condition, you're close to saying "if you don't hurt yourself, your chances of hurting yourself is 0". (by the way, so proper firearm practices include "don't kill yourself if you're very depressed"?)
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  Yeah precisely. I am saying your chance of hurting yourself with a gun is zero if you just don't act like an idiot with a gun. the average statistics include massive numbers of idiots. I am not part of that population. Ergo, my risk is far different than theirs.
  - eviks 3y ago
    You've made a much stronger, but false and based on faulty logic, claim about 0 But I see from your other comments that you have a crystal ball with 200% certainty of being right about the future, so it's a pointless argument
    - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
      What im saying is that people have agency over their own behaviour. To throw out a blanket statistic and act like you have no control over where you land is insane. Okay how about this : Lets say over the next week, on average, 10% of the population will eat more calories than their maintenance requirements. Now for me, is my probability 10%? No, because I can actively decide which side of that I want to end up on. If I want to eat under maintenance, my chance is 0% if I want to overeat, my chance is 100% (provided adequate access to calories) Is this making my point any more clear? Im saying that if mitigation strategies exist for gun safety exist, then it makes no sense to say that 2 people with wildly different safety standards have the same probability of injurying themselves just because a particular average statistic has been studied and published at some point.

tunesmith 3y ago

That's generally the racial profiling fallacy, too. Applying demographic probabilities to the individual.

DontchaKnowit 3y ago
yeah absolutely. If there is not a term for that phenomenon more broadly there should be. Its basically just a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics that even people educated in statistics seem to fall for
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

techdmn 3y ago

I think it makes sense to want a study that controls for gun training and intelligence, I don't think it makes sense to reject data based conclusions due to anecdotal disagreement. My understanding is that a lot of those self-inflicted wounds are suicide attempts, which one would not expect to be influenced by firearm proficiency (except perhaps in success rate).

DontchaKnowit 3y ago
it would be affected by someones predisposition to depression and suicidal ideation though right? I tell you what - I will never commit suicide, and I will never accidentally harm myself with a gun. No amount of "studies" about the average gun owner are going to change those facts. You are rejecting reality by deferring to expertise.

alexpetralia 3y ago

I think this is basically Simpson's Paradox. If you take an average across the entire population, that is actually the average if you were to randomly select an individual from the population (i.e. the long-run value after repeated sampling). However, if you were to examine particular subgroups, they may wildly deviate from the average, and so in any particular subgroup, the mean is not at all like the population average. If you have more information on the particular subgroup you are sampling from, then you should of course use that information to estimate the relevant average. If you don't, or the claim you're making spans many comparable subgroups, then perhaps a broader average applies.

lucas_membrane 3y ago
I saw a report recently that said that a population study (from some country in Europe, IIRC) showed that people who are still getting their COVID vaccinations updated are subsequently having worse COVID experience than others. Unfortunately, there are three possible explanations for this that immediately come to mind: (1) The vaccine increases risk; (2) People have some way of inferring their need for vaccine, which the study could not or did not take into its analysis, and the vaccinated group was a self-selected high risk group; (3) The vaccinated group felt protected enough by the vaccine to eschew isolation and make itself a high risk group. Note that 2 of these work in one direction an 1 in the other, and that all three might simultaneously be true enough of some subset of the studied population to be significant in determining the study's results. Do science, but carry humility, especially about why people do anything, what that means, and what is unknowable within your context.

briantakita 3y ago

> On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific case, X is more likely than Y. I'll take this a bit further. X is more likely than Y so Y is not going to happen & we should not consider Y. There's a book, recommended by Bill Gates no less, "How to lie with statistics". From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics > Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do. I'll claim that statistics & even extracting quanta from qualia is going to have data loss from the sampling. So forecasting from statistics requires context on what is being forecasted.

bhpm 3y ago

The gun example suffers from a lack of nuance in risk quantification. Anyone who owns a gun is putting their own life at risk, because “basically zero” is not “zero.” So the statement is “If you own a gun, you are putting your life at risk” is technically true, it’s just not very useful. The way to overcome this is to start with the average risk and subtract from it by naming specific mitigations that must be in place to reduce risk. Unfortunately, it seems that in the US, there isn’t a voice of “responsible gun owners” in the conversation. There are only two voices: those who would ban them outright and those who would make any restriction illegal. By the way, the largest victim of gun violence in the US is gun owners due to suicide. It’s unclear what mitigations one could put in place to prevent that.

DontchaKnowit 3y ago
I don't really understand how suicide violence can be blamed on guns. Million ways to kill oneself that are easily accessible. At any rate I agree, the moderate educated gun owner is a majorly minority viewpoint for sure.
- phatskat 3y ago
  > Million ways to kill oneself that are easily accessible. A key factor to look at when someone is experiencing suicidal ideation is to evaluate whether they have a concrete plan. Someone is much more likely to succeed or even attempt suicide if they have a thought out plan of actionable steps. Most non-gun methods I can think of off the top of my head come with risk factors that would require more complex planning. But, with easy access to a firearm, the planning becomes much simpler in many ways.
- bhpm 3y ago
  Women are more likely to attempt suicide, and men are more likely to succeed. Gun ownership is overwhelmingly male.
  - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    okay, your point?

petsfed 3y ago

I believe you're committing the no-true-scotsman rhetorical fallacy. Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't have easy access to guns. About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0]. If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people are not following those practices, in which case some other mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is necessary. I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't keep our firearms in our home. 0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...

buttercraft 3y ago
I would say that, yes, a HUGE number of gun owners fail basic gun safety. In my area, you do not have to demonstrate knowledge of firearms to own one. I've seen a lot of idiots on the range, and that's why I only go shooting with people I know and trust.
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  at my local range I have seen the following : - A man teaching his girlfriend to shoot a tech nine. She was holding it with her finger over the barrel and was moments away from firing before my dad notice and stopped her - A roughly 12 year old jumping out of a van, pulling a pistol directly from his waistband, and firing downrange without ever taking a safety off. Also most gun owners I know just keep their guns like, on a shelf somewhere, with the bullets either in the gun or nearby. So yeah there are a lot of people that don't use any brain cells whatsoever when handling firearms. Get your youtube algorithm to start serving you shorts from the hip-hop enthusiast gun-modification community, you'll see some real idiocy in short order.

eviks 3y ago

"If you follow" is a tautological condition, you're close to saying "if you don't hurt yourself, your chances of hurting yourself is 0". (by the way, so proper firearm practices include "don't kill yourself if you're very depressed"?)

DontchaKnowit 3y ago
Yeah precisely. I am saying your chance of hurting yourself with a gun is zero if you just don't act like an idiot with a gun. the average statistics include massive numbers of idiots. I am not part of that population. Ergo, my risk is far different than theirs.
- eviks 3y ago
  You've made a much stronger, but false and based on faulty logic, claim about 0 But I see from your other comments that you have a crystal ball with 200% certainty of being right about the future, so it's a pointless argument
  - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    What im saying is that people have agency over their own behaviour. To throw out a blanket statistic and act like you have no control over where you land is insane. Okay how about this : Lets say over the next week, on average, 10% of the population will eat more calories than their maintenance requirements. Now for me, is my probability 10%? No, because I can actively decide which side of that I want to end up on. If I want to eat under maintenance, my chance is 0% if I want to overeat, my chance is 100% (provided adequate access to calories) Is this making my point any more clear? Im saying that if mitigation strategies exist for gun safety exist, then it makes no sense to say that 2 people with wildly different safety standards have the same probability of injurying themselves just because a particular average statistic has been studied and published at some point.