OSD 261: Murder rates are determined by your level of zoom
If society is bubble tea, violence is the bubbles, not the milk.
Baltimore has a violent reputation. Here it is in a list of American cities ranked by murder rate:
Here’s the same list in reverse order:
This came up on Twitter in a discussion of analyzing murder rates by race (and here’s Brady wading into the topic).
High-level averages are a tell: a discussion that relies on them is probably misleading you. For example, the numbers above would tell you that your risk of death goes up the second you get inside of Baltimore’s beltway. But here are some numbers that tell a different story:
Baltimore is the second-most murderous city in the US — but a fifth of its neighborhoods are safer than Switzerland. Others are unfathomably violent, with quadruple the murder rate of the most violent countries in the world. All in the same city. And if you’re in either set of neighborhoods, you’d never know the other even exists.
Violence does not show up evenly distributed throughout a society at the average rate. It’s lumpy, and your personal risk rate is determined almost entirely by whether you’re in a spot in society (geographically, behaviorally, demographically, etc.) where violence shows up — the spots that pull the average up.
From “OSD 241: Violence is like getting into Harvard”:
This applies to any process where you try to translate group-level outcomes into your own personal odds for seeing the same outcome. A story from memory (because Google isn’t turning it up): Paul Graham was talking about Y Combinator acceptance rates on a forum once, 10+ years ago. He said something to the effect of, “Y Combinator having a 2% acceptance rate doesn't mean that you have a 2% chance of getting in. It means that 2% of applicants have a near-100% chance, and 98% of applicants have almost zero chance.”
There are places where gun culture needs a reminder of this. Go to a gun shop and you might hear someone say they avoid cities for fear of violence. That’s an example of the sort of innumeracy that we often point out from gun control groups. Making life decisions based on innumeracy means you miss a lot of gratifying personal experiences. Gun rights are about personal agency. And the goal of personal agency is to live a life full of meaning and purpose. So just like a gun and your tactical training, add these numbers to your personal agency toolkit. Risk of violence is mostly a matter of your level of zoom. Adjust your zoom accordingly.
This week’s links
Washington Post on hearing loss
… heavy gun use ranked up there with diabetes, heavy smoking and prolonged exposure to very loud noise at work as one of the most significant risk factors for hearing loss in the 2011-2012 data. And it’s not a niche hobby.
Suppressors weren’t mentioned in the article but are a good hearing loss prevention measure. h/t Discord subscriber WaGuns45.
How to appeal Instagram and Facebook content bans
Have you gotten messages like the ones below on IG/FB posts for your gun-related business? Reach out to us, we know people there and can help push your appeals.
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This is an idea that comes up a lot more than just in gun control. In fact, almost literally every national-level average statistic that we compile has this problem. When you average over a highly heterogenous data set, you generate a summary statistic that, while technically accurate, is not representative of _anyone's_ experience.
Back in 2014 when President Obama was pushing his gun control agenda, I did some research using FBI statistics about homicide rates in the USA. I first did them by state, then narrowed successively down to cities, counties, then voting precincts. What I found was that the safest places to live were those that had the greatest percentage population of Caucasians, followed by greatest percentage of Asians. The most dangerous places to live were those with the highest percentage of blacks, then Hispanics. When I published it to the select group of firearms owners, at first, I was called racist. I challenged those who disagreed with me to do their own research and tell me where I was wrong. Crickets. At any rate, I suspect that if I were to do that same study today, the results would be similar.