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The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. One interesting thing about news coverage is it covers NEWS

by glenra 13y ago

The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. One interesting thing about news coverage is it covers NEWS - stuff that is new or that happens rarely. Once you've seen something happen a thousand times before, it stops being news. Auto accidents, being common, don't get national news coverage. High-profile kidnappings and large-bodycount school shootings, being much more rare, do. The fact that news has this dynamic means you can't take the amount of news coverage as an indication of how serious or common a problem is. We DO do that due to a cognitive error called "availability bias", but if anything, the reverse strategy would be more sensible. In short: if you see a threat in the newspapers, you should assume it's news because it happens so rarely that it isn't worth your worrying about anymore (if it ever was).

lutusp 13y ago
> The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. You're making a common statistical error, one that climate change deniers use daily -- if you perform a moving average using a long averaging interval, the climate is warming up. If you perform a moving average using a short averaging interval, the climate is cooling off. The second measurement is an error because it can only predict the future if the future is limited to a year or two in duration. But the long averaging interval is a more honest and reliable predictor of the future. That predictor shows a warming of the climate, and it also shows that eventually, population growth will collide with mass death.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  > You're making a common statistical error You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. You don't get to have your cake and eat it.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita.
    - glenra 13y ago
      >> You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. > And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. 1932 was near a local maximum in terms of violence rates in the US; currently we are near a local minimum. (The current homicide rate is less than half what it was in 1932.)
      - lutusp 13y ago
        > Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. No, not if a reasonable moving average is performed. And per capita modifies the logic in a way that reduces the importance of population, when my point is the size of that population. Here's a small interval graph that shows an increase per capita since 1960: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim... Another graph that shows the same trend: http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/briefs/2008_08_crime_fig4.gif http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/briefs/2008_08_crime_fig4.... The above graph shows the risk of using too short a sampling interval. If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased.
        glenra 13y ago
        > If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased. How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate, and do so over a range wide enough to INCLUDE 1932. Can you do that? If you do that, I think you will find that you are wrong about this - the homicide rate today is lower than it was in 1932. Because there was a huge peak around the 1930s PRIOR TO the relatively low point in the 1950s. I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average" since the underlying trend is pretty smooth, but if you did, say, a 5-year moving average it would STILL be lower today than in 1932.
- glenra 13y ago
  In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. So how big an interval do YOU think is appropriate to look at for the murder rate? Go back too far and you get into measurement problems. Merely counting incidents (as the wikipedia page does) is nonsense for several reasons (1) a vastly better news network is going to make more incidents easy to find today than in the past, (2) incidents that happened since the internet and in recent people's memories are going to be overrepresented, (3) population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining. In the case of climate change, the trend for the last decade is flat/cooling - that's more than "a year or two". Which is not terribly consistent with the models - the models clearly have been running hotter than observations and are have been unreliable predictors. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:120/trend http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. To make that claim, you need to define "rate". Does "rate" mean the absolute number of murders per day or year, or the number of murders per day or year divided by the population? The absolute rate is obviously higher -- the burden must be is yours to offer evidence that it's unchanged since 1800. But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point. Also, when you perform a moving average, you can "prove" anything by choosing the right interval. But, because the future is expected to be long, so should our averaging interval. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest. For example, climate change deniers use short averaging intervals to "prove" that the climate is actually cooling, where the same measure using a longer averaging interval shows this is false. Oh, I see you do just that. Too bad -- choosing an inappropriate averaging interval is not science, it's politics. > ... population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining. Well ... now that you're arguing my points for me, I guess we're done.
    - glenra 13y ago

by glenra 13y ago

lutusp 13y ago

> The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. You're making a common statistical error, one that climate change deniers use daily -- if you perform a moving average using a long averaging interval, the climate is warming up. If you perform a moving average using a short averaging interval, the climate is cooling off. The second measurement is an error because it can only predict the future if the future is limited to a year or two in duration. But the long averaging interval is a more honest and reliable predictor of the future. That predictor shows a warming of the climate, and it also shows that eventually, population growth will collide with mass death.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
> You're making a common statistical error You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. You don't get to have your cake and eat it.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita.
  - glenra 13y ago
    >> You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. > And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. 1932 was near a local maximum in terms of violence rates in the US; currently we are near a local minimum. (The current homicide rate is less than half what it was in 1932.)
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. No, not if a reasonable moving average is performed. And per capita modifies the logic in a way that reduces the importance of population, when my point is the size of that population. Here's a small interval graph that shows an increase per capita since 1960: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim... Another graph that shows the same trend: http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/briefs/2008_08_crime_fig4.gif http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/briefs/2008_08_crime_fig4.... The above graph shows the risk of using too short a sampling interval. If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased.
      - glenra 13y ago
        > If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased. How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate, and do so over a range wide enough to INCLUDE 1932. Can you do that? If you do that, I think you will find that you are wrong about this - the homicide rate today is lower than it was in 1932. Because there was a huge peak around the 1930s PRIOR TO the relatively low point in the 1950s. I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average" since the underlying trend is pretty smooth, but if you did, say, a 5-year moving average it would STILL be lower today than in 1932.
glenra 13y ago
In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. So how big an interval do YOU think is appropriate to look at for the murder rate? Go back too far and you get into measurement problems. Merely counting incidents (as the wikipedia page does) is nonsense for several reasons (1) a vastly better news network is going to make more incidents easy to find today than in the past, (2) incidents that happened since the internet and in recent people's memories are going to be overrepresented, (3) population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining. In the case of climate change, the trend for the last decade is flat/cooling - that's more than "a year or two". Which is not terribly consistent with the models - the models clearly have been running hotter than observations and are have been unreliable predictors. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:120/trend http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...
- lutusp 13y ago
  > In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. To make that claim, you need to define "rate". Does "rate" mean the absolute number of murders per day or year, or the number of murders per day or year divided by the population? The absolute rate is obviously higher -- the burden must be is yours to offer evidence that it's unchanged since 1800. But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point. Also, when you perform a moving average, you can "prove" anything by choosing the right interval. But, because the future is expected to be long, so should our averaging interval. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest. For example, climate change deniers use short averaging intervals to "prove" that the climate is actually cooling, where the same measure using a longer averaging interval shows this is false. Oh, I see you do just that. Too bad -- choosing an inappropriate averaging interval is not science, it's politics. > ... population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining. Well ... now that you're arguing my points for me, I guess we're done.
  - glenra 13y ago