"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Is Britain More Violent Than the United States?
An illustration of the foolishness of believing statistics...about crime or anything else with out careful analysis. Analysis that very, very few people are capable of simply because few people understand anything about statistics. Numbers don't lie, but the people who generate them can, and do, every day.
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Why do statistics matter at all? It is irrelevant whether more or fewer people are killed. What only matters is whether you wish to be armed.
Worrying about statistics is evidence you are making the wrong kinds of arguments (i.e., utilitarian ones). Fuck the statistics, and the utilitarian arguments.
I agree totally. "Individualists" making arguments based on statistics is like having a salad with a candy bar and a beer...it defeats its own arguement.
Honestly done, statistics are sometimes useful- but not in philosophical discourse. And especially not by those that don't understand how they work- which is just about everybody. We have all been trained to take"numbers" very seriously, "they don't lie" after all. But statistics isn't mathematics, it's an extrapolation based on probability and correlation...both of which are open to wild interpretation.
It's quite creative bullshit masquerading as "science."
Mike
Stats have a function at every level, from deception to speculations.