Oct 3, 2023·edited Oct 3, 2023Liked by Open Source Defense
" if they intuit that their personal risk of murder is ~zero, they’ll respond against anything that worsens their odds, no matter how slightly. "
I think we've just come onto the reason why people react to mass shootings the way they do. It's disruptive to their sense of risk. They know they're generally immune to 'normal' murder, but the mass shooter, rare as it is, disrupts the algebra. This experience is inherently disconcerting.
Oct 2, 2023·edited Oct 2, 2023Liked by Open Source Defense
> But that assumes the risk is evenly distributed, and of course it is not. Statistics change based on how far you zoom in. This is an example of Simpson’s paradox. An easy way to demonstrate it is to zoom out as far as possible. The worldwide average homicide rate is roughly 6.1 murders per 100,000 people. But that doesn’t tell you anything about your own personal murder risk. You can keep going and make it even more useless — zoom out further to the whole universe, whose murder rate asymptotically approaches zero. Equally useless for telling you whether you should walk outside alone at night.
This is one of my Big Ideas, and I'm sure I've shared it here before.
ALL statistics about "The United States" are meaningless, because they are statistical aggregates over a highly heterogenous population that do not generalize to any individuals in that population
So, to make up some illustrative numbers, you might hear that the murder rate in the US is 10/100k. So you might think, I have a one in ten thousand chance, per year, of being murdered.
Except, inevitably, the way they got that 10/100k murder rate was by averaging over a bunch of sleepy quiet areas where the murder rate is essentially 0, and then a bunch of violent inner city neighbourhoods where the murder rate is 200/100k. The average is technically correct, but meaningless if your goal is to evaluate your own personal risk of being murdered.
This is true of _**ALL**_ stats in the US, on all subjects, always. You have to drill down and be way more specific and targetted in your statistical analysis before the output becomes useful
The idea of specific versus general risk rates remined me of the microCOVID tool that was created back in late 2020. https://www.microcovid.org/
While one might well take issue with the specific numbers they used, the idea of tailoring your risk calculation/profile to the specific activities you were engaging in, and the environments where they were occurring, gave you a much better perspective on your actual risk. I wonder if a similar level of granularity could be arrived at for homicide risk (or other "gun death" categories) without getting dragged down in the politics of the issue.
The number one factor in your risk for becoming a victim of "gun violence" is race. While Chicago has a famously impressive number of murders per year, and is closing in on 500 for 2023, almost all of those being murdered are black (82%), with Hispanics making up around 14% of the rest. Whites and all "others" like Asians? Only 4%, for a total of 20 murders in 2023 in a city of 2.7 million people, a little under 1/3 of those White (the largest racial subgroup in the city) and another 7% being Asian. Over one million Whites and Asians in Chicago with 20 murders. That is a pretty safe place, at least from a murder standpoint. Carjacking and other violent crimes like rape are a different story of course.
" if they intuit that their personal risk of murder is ~zero, they’ll respond against anything that worsens their odds, no matter how slightly. "
I think we've just come onto the reason why people react to mass shootings the way they do. It's disruptive to their sense of risk. They know they're generally immune to 'normal' murder, but the mass shooter, rare as it is, disrupts the algebra. This experience is inherently disconcerting.
> But that assumes the risk is evenly distributed, and of course it is not. Statistics change based on how far you zoom in. This is an example of Simpson’s paradox. An easy way to demonstrate it is to zoom out as far as possible. The worldwide average homicide rate is roughly 6.1 murders per 100,000 people. But that doesn’t tell you anything about your own personal murder risk. You can keep going and make it even more useless — zoom out further to the whole universe, whose murder rate asymptotically approaches zero. Equally useless for telling you whether you should walk outside alone at night.
This is one of my Big Ideas, and I'm sure I've shared it here before.
ALL statistics about "The United States" are meaningless, because they are statistical aggregates over a highly heterogenous population that do not generalize to any individuals in that population
So, to make up some illustrative numbers, you might hear that the murder rate in the US is 10/100k. So you might think, I have a one in ten thousand chance, per year, of being murdered.
Except, inevitably, the way they got that 10/100k murder rate was by averaging over a bunch of sleepy quiet areas where the murder rate is essentially 0, and then a bunch of violent inner city neighbourhoods where the murder rate is 200/100k. The average is technically correct, but meaningless if your goal is to evaluate your own personal risk of being murdered.
This is true of _**ALL**_ stats in the US, on all subjects, always. You have to drill down and be way more specific and targetted in your statistical analysis before the output becomes useful
The idea of specific versus general risk rates remined me of the microCOVID tool that was created back in late 2020. https://www.microcovid.org/
While one might well take issue with the specific numbers they used, the idea of tailoring your risk calculation/profile to the specific activities you were engaging in, and the environments where they were occurring, gave you a much better perspective on your actual risk. I wonder if a similar level of granularity could be arrived at for homicide risk (or other "gun death" categories) without getting dragged down in the politics of the issue.
Is this the Y Combinator story you were remembering?
https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y-combinator-are-not-1-in-100-d28206fc543d
The number one factor in your risk for becoming a victim of "gun violence" is race. While Chicago has a famously impressive number of murders per year, and is closing in on 500 for 2023, almost all of those being murdered are black (82%), with Hispanics making up around 14% of the rest. Whites and all "others" like Asians? Only 4%, for a total of 20 murders in 2023 in a city of 2.7 million people, a little under 1/3 of those White (the largest racial subgroup in the city) and another 7% being Asian. Over one million Whites and Asians in Chicago with 20 murders. That is a pretty safe place, at least from a murder standpoint. Carjacking and other violent crimes like rape are a different story of course.