I've read that more children have died of gunshot wounds this year than police officers have died in the line of duty.[1]
Granted, there are probably more school children at school than there are police at work on any given day, so ... of course children are more likely to be shot at a school?
But then again, here in Australia we have reasonable gun control after that mass schooling in Tasmania all those years ago ... and the country still turned to shit ... so?
While were here, anyone else got any arguments no one would intentionally make?
The outrage always happens on politically charged subjects, but worse outcomes happen on the roads, and nobody talks about it as though it was normal.
Kids should fear crossing the street more than an active shooter. While i don't disagree that gun control is a good outcome, the difficulty of achieving it in the US is real. Effort is better spent addressing the root cause of gun violence, rather than attempting to take the guns away and just hope that the violence doesn't occur.
It's true, though. If you were to live many lives in a row, when would be your first time getting shot? "News" agencies are great at distracting attention from real issues: cancer, chemicals contamination, healthcare prices.
That's very true.
There's an unprecedented amount of distorted news too. I never believed it until I got a worried message from a friend about wildfires in our area. There are none. I had also read an article in my local news about devastating wildfires in his area, of which there are also none at his place. These were both generally well-respected mainstream media outlets.
That's not saying we shouldn't focus on climate change ASAP, but it looks to me as the news broadcasts have an agenda to keep people in fear.
Exactly. As I tell my son, the news organizations are no different than other vendors. They have a product to sell (fear, societal divide) and do their very best to continue selling it to the masses. And, astonishingly, people eat it up day and night.
For the people who live outside the US and consume our "news", it must seem our country is falling apart. From gun violence, to wildfires, to racism, to homelessness, we truly must be living in a 3rd world country. However, my experience does not reflect any of this. Yes, these issues exist, but everyday I can go to the grocery store, put gas in my wife's car, walk downtown, take a trip to the lake, visit a neighboring town, etc - all without fear. People of differing backgrounds/colors talk pleasantly with each other, neighbors help neighbors, etc. Totally different from what the "media" is pushing these days.
My advice - walk/run away from the media and don't attach yourself to any political party. Your emotional state will thank you later.
If the statistical relevance fails to capture the underlying practical relevance of a phenomenon, it’s usually the job of the statistician to explain why.
One way is examining the dimensions of analysis. A simple counting exercise and declaring “well it’s just not relevant,” despite contradictory qualitative evidence is really simple-minded and an abuse of statistical reasoning.
But this is typical of non-research thinking, in non-academic contexts so forgive me if I come off harshly.
No such thing as "practical relevance". It doesn't matter that sharks or bears look scary: hard stats say that both dangers are imaginary. Same for guns.
“Practical relevance” (funny use of quotes here) is the end-goal of statistics, and what makes it worth studying in the first place. On its own, the practice and theory of statistics is actually fairly vulnerable, not exactly “hard” in the sense we’d use for conventional mathematics.
The principles we use for relevance, and other techniques we’ve built upon them are axiomatic: there’s no real reason they persist except as a form of historical convention and necessary standardization.
What makes statistics useful is when it’s able to capture quantitatively something that exists practically, i.e. material phenomena. When the stats don’t square with reality, it’s not exactly reality’s fault, so to speak. It’s the statistician’s job to understand and explain why the statistics, or the techniques thereof, failed. This is the red meat of “hard” statistics, how the field refines itself, and it’s also the most fun and challenging thing about it.
When eye-to-eye with a provoked bear in real life, I’d be curious to see if any statisticians would dismiss it on statistical grounds. My bet is zero because they know the limits of their discipline.
