3 ms·

Memphis, TN (Shelby County) has the highest homicide rate in the entire country. Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities an

by smcin 1y ago

Memphis, TN (Shelby County) has the highest homicide rate in the entire country. Why is it in any way meaningful to lump that in with unrelated small cities and counties in TN? (any more than including/excluding East Hammond, IN's gun sales in Chicago metro stats?) To @bigbacalaoa: The city of Franklin and Williamson County, TN are not Nashville; they're separate things in the Nashville metropolitan area. So your analogy to neighborhoods of Sao Paolo is offbase.

dlcarrier 1y ago
Ranking crime rates by city or county, instead of by state, reverses the correlation between crime rates and politics: https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate-and-the-limits-of-empirical-social-science https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate... That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering. A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.
- smcin 1y ago
  Really appreciate your link but I can't understand if "that article" and "they" is referring to Manhattan Institute, my citation of Patch, or the ancestor CNBC article. So I can't understand your second paragraph.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy > The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist. > The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter. By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    I was just responding to your question about local vs state statistics, not the original article, so "they" was meant to refer to the Manhattan Institute, in the article I linked.

by smcin 1y ago

dlcarrier 1y ago

Ranking crime rates by city or county, instead of by state, reverses the correlation between crime rates and politics: https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate-and-the-limits-of-empirical-social-science https://manhattan.institute/article/red-vs-blue-crime-debate... That article is from a conservative organization, and local crime rates have a much larger impact on individuals than state crime rates, so they could make a "we're right and you're wrong" claim by focusing on the more pertinent data, but instead they came to an even better conclusion: The correlation is so weak that it's easy to manipulate into any outcome, so it's not worth considering. A very small correlation to a specific category may be statistically significant, but it's what doctors call clinically insignificant, which is to say it doesn't make enough of a difference to bother with.

smcin 1y ago
Really appreciate your link but I can't understand if "that article" and "they" is referring to Manhattan Institute, my citation of Patch, or the ancestor CNBC article. So I can't understand your second paragraph.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  I think that they are saying that you and/or TFA re: Utah may be making something like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, or maybe even the exception that proves the rule of that fallacy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy > The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred. This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist. > The name comes from a metaphor about a person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter. By not being able to account for the commonly held belief that Utah has a high standard of living, and by focusing on factors that may not be relevant to the standard of living in a specific regard due to local conditions, such as the lower incidence of childcare faciilties not coming up as much due to larger (extended) families filling the gap, while not accounting for that either way in their analysis because it was a blind spot to begin with and wasn't properly hypothesized before analysis, etc, this might be a version of an exception to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that proves the rule, because it seems that there are actual sharpshooters around, and we find ourselves in Texas, hypothetically speaking.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I was just responding to your question about local vs state statistics, not the original article, so "they" was meant to refer to the Manhattan Institute, in the article I linked.