Metrics Mania and the Countless Counting Problem 138
mobkarma writes "Einstein once said, 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' A New York Times article suggests that unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers. The problem isn't with statistical tests themselves, but with what we do before and after we run them. If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count."
Technically (Score:4, Funny)
Cancer itself could be considered a form of killing yourself.
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Cancer itself could be considered a form of killing yourself.
I believe your literal translation is misplaced. The term "killing yourself" strongly implies an explicit and voluntary act that results in your death. Merely having your body mutate without doing something to cause it (like jumping into a toxic waste dump) isn't a form of killing yourself.
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Well killing another human being doesn't have to be intentional, does it? There are quite a few accidents that happen.
It's not as if someone other than your own genes determined your cancerous state, unless as you say, you were put in a situation where you were exposed to dangerous radiation levels.
But that usually isn't the case. Either way, not intentional, I was just eluding to the whole "Having your own cells mutate and attack you" is still pretty much you, killing yourself, as unintentional as it may b
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"Eluding". definition:
1. Evading or escaping from, as by daring, cleverness, or skill
2. Escaping the understanding or grasp of
"Alluding", definition:
Making an indirect reference
Yes, I'm a spelling nazi today....
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Especially since the FP was relying on being "technically" correct (which, in all fairness, is the BEST kind of correctness)...
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Go smoke your grass somewhere else, ya damn grammar hippie freak!
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It's an allusion!
("Final countdown" starts playing in the background)
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Yes, I'm a spelling nazi today....
I think the distinction between spelling and meaning/usage has alluded you ;-)
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Knowing that excessive alcohol and tobacco use greatly increases your risk of heart problems and cancer, and doing it anyway I believe IS a form of slow suicide.
No it is not. It is though a risk. It is a choice to take the risk.
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Re:Technically (Score:5, Insightful)
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You realize what cancer is don't you? Your cells (part of you) grow at an uncontrolled rate. It's pretty literally your body going crazy to the point where it can kill you.
Relax, it wasn't an insult or an attack. It was a word game. Enjoy.
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Call me crazy, but actually, your chance of dying of cancer is probably due to doing something you *think* is healthy, but really isn't -> like eating carbohydrates.
Check out this guy's lecture on the "diseases of civilization" that would appear whenever carbohydrates got introduced into the diets of indigenous folk:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216 [berkeley.edu]
There's
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oh grow up you pussy.
cancer is by it's very nature your own cells killing you.
no apology is in order.
Man up. NOW.
nukes? gasoline? people seem to have this belief that it's all modern things and technology which cause cancer.
Radiation from randon from granite is responsible for the vast majority of the background radiation you recieve and the vast majority of cancers are more to do with perfectly natural carcinogens in our environments.
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Go home and get some sleep. You REALLY need it
You're right; I've had the flu all week and completely missed his point. My brain hasn't been functioning well at all.
I thought the joke went the other way? (Score:2, Funny)
Q: What did the clinically depressed alcoholic man with acute cirrhosis get for Christmas?
A: Cancer
Deep down (Score:2)
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We're all just afraid of uncertainty. It is the shadow from which anything potentially could arise. Our brains are just hardwired to be much more fearful than hopeful (for obvious evolutionary reasons).
It really depends on the context. For some things were overly fearful and for some were overly hopeful. One of the most common errors in reasoning is to engage in wishful thinking. Some forms of wishful thinking are very blatant with people explicitly believing in something because they'd rather have it be true than not.
cirrhosis (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cirrhosis (Score:5, Funny)
Insightful (Score:1, Redundant)
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Cancer can last years, you can easily destroy your liver before then if you spend all your time drinking.
Poisoning requires a very large amount of alcohol in your blood at one time, well above the level that liver damage starts. If you maintain a constant blood-alcohol level above what your liver can handle you will be actively destroying your liver.
It's certainly possible for a depressed non-drinker to turn to drinking as a form of self-medication and destroy their liver before the cancer does. Poison le
Goodhart's law (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a restatement of the simultaneously-discovered Goodhart's Law [lesswrong.com], Lucas critique [wikipedia.org], and Campbell's Law [wikipedia.org].
Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.
Here, people take these cancer tests as a measure of their probability of cancer. But once they start to treat them as reliable, they start doing more self-destructive things, destroying the correlation between the proxy (the cancer test) and the actual probability of cancer.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Many years ago, I had an in-depth discussion about gathering statistics on heart disease with a woman on the board of the American Heart Association. This was a big deal. Serious ethical issues were in play and there was a great deal of infighting going on.
I asked her how you make a definitive decision that someone has heart disease. I was trying to figure out what to measure. Her answer surprised me. She said "You wait till they die. Then you cut out their heart and have a look." She then went on to patiently explain to me that the only thing that could be measured and evaluated were "markers" of heart disease. Those markers, as revealed by various disgnostic tests, could be mighty reliable. But you never know if someone is going to die of heart disease until they...you know...actually *die*.
Thus informed, I came to realize that what we measure is almost never what we really want to know. Measuring the right stuff is simply too hard to do. No matter where you look, this is almost universally true. In my job, for example, we fix computer problems. Thus, we measure how many incidents get closed and how much time it took. If you quickly close an incident, then surely you've provided good service, right? Most slashdotters should realize that's not true. In fact, my job is actually to get other, more important workers back to work asap. The only way to measure that would be to interview my customers and their bosses. We'd have to pry for an hour into their effectiveness to find out if I properly completed a job that took me five minutes. That's too much trouble, so we look for markers. Closed incidents. Timeliness of closures.
Measures are inadequate so often that I pretty much don't trust anything that contains them. After years of training in Quality Improvement Processes, I came to realize that the amount of time needed to understand a process and perfectly spec out what needs to be measured is 452% of the expected life cycle of the project, plus or minus a 17.5% margin of error. (Aside - How much do you trust those statistics?)
Almost no one can devote the time required to do the job (no matter what "the job" is) right. We just hope people do their best and trust to good intentions.
As a computer guy who wants things to be either "yes" or "no", unambiguously, I found this state of affairs very difficult to accept. But it's just part of being human.
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Another example is the processor clock frequency. People took the frequency as indication of processor speed, and Intel reacted by making the Pentium do less per clock cycle, so they could increase the number for the same actual speed.
I also guess measuring programmer productivity in lines of code actually encourages not reusing code (after all, if you write basically the same functionality again, you get more lines of code than if you just reuse existing code).
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Indeed! Identifying what proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_%28statistics%29) to use is one of the trickier aspects in the soft sciences and statistics. If you read the Economist, you'd see proxies for just about everything (e.g. http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/ [economist.com]), and a lot of research is required just to show what a given proxy measures.
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A refreshing point of view. A surprising amount of IT weenies seem think that what they do is the most important thing in the entire company, and that the rest of the organization needs to bow down to their whims.
I remember having to explain to an IT worker that if they weren't going to change the schedule of the forced anti-virus full scan from 10:30am, I was going to delete the software since it was keeping me from doing m
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Where I work, the weekly check-it-all AV run is scheduled for Sunday nights. That takes care of all the desktops in the office. Laptops run, then, as soon as they get put on the network Monday. Generally, people don't mind, especially since our AV software runs in the background and doesn't slow anybody down enough that it's worth complaining about. Their machines are a bit sluggish on Monday morning but, then again, so are most of the workers.
The folks who find that the AV scan slows them unacceptably
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He didn't seem to understand that... having almost every machine be unusable for three hours in the middle of the work day cost a lot of productive time.
Oh... You had Symantec's AV, huh?
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I wish my supervisor would accept this. But then, his supervisor would need to accept it, and on and on to the top. I feel like I spend more time at my job trying to quantify my work than actually doing it. And the resulting numbers are always meaningless.
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Interesting. Before we had mandatory ticketing software, deskside IT support folks in my organization had assigned user populations. I had 350 (or so) officers to keep happy. That was my job. Screw tickets, screw counting anything. If the officers that depended on me were happy, I was happy. And so was my boss.
Then we started measuring things and the quality of my worklife took a big hit. I'll never forget a crusty old sysadmin who spoke out during a training session to an HQ analyst. Quote: "I can
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What you call "the way we do business today", I prefer to call "crappy management". A bit shorter and more to the point.
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not sure exactly if its related, but this reminded me of a experiment done where a downtown area had all kind of traffic lights and such removed. The end effect was contradictory, as the actual rate of accidents went down.
But then any corp thats publicly traded the job of the management is not to sell products or services, but to make the corporation look good on the trade floor.
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When you quantify your work, don't forget to quantify the work you invest in quantifying your work.
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The most annoying thing about the bean-counting mentality is the creation of beans to count. For example, in the NHS it is really difficult to do stats on patient care as each case is different so the beancounting management impose additional paperwork or data entry tasks to create countable beans. Hooray! Suddenly more 'data' for layers of management to fight amongst themselves with, at only the cost of reduced patient care due to reduced medical (as opposed to clerical) time available to the medical staff
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heck, excessive bean counting may well have been what drove the soviet union to collapse.
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The only way to measure that would be to interview my customers and their bosses. We'd have to pry for an hour into their effectiveness to find out if I properly completed a job that took me five minutes.
It's not really as hard as that. There is an interim marker you can use that is nearly as good as anything you'll get from an interview. All you really need to know is if the customers are happy with your service. If your service eats up a lot of their time, i.e. doesn't keep them working as long as possible, they won't be happy.
There are still limits to that - it doesn't work if your IT department is servicing 3,000 users. However, if it's 300 users with a single point of contact, you'll know pretty qu
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My IT department services about 100,000 users.
I still think that just asking my customers how well I helped them with their problems is the best way to gauge my performance. I argued along those lines to management for a while but to no avail.
Now, we're in the process of removing nearly all "deskside" support and forcing em
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Sounds like a restatement of the simultaneously-discovered Goodhart's Law [lesswrong.com], Lucas critique [wikipedia.org], and Campbell's Law [wikipedia.org].
Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.
A few years back I was working for a major corporation that was pushing Six Sigma [wikipedia.org] as the holy grail for all problems, and I was forced to attend some seminars. (Afterwards I christened the program Six Sigmoidoscopies [wikipedia.org] , which may have even underestimated the pain involved.) One of the presenters talked about the difficulty of applying hard statistical quality analysis to something as abstract as software development, but more or less proceeded to say that the solution was to find whatever metrics could be
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Well, glad you know the term(s) for it so you can learn more about at and what to call it!
Btw, I've had a flexible sigmoidoscopy, and they're not painful, they administer something IV to knock you out so it's over before you know it and you don't experience any pain, unless you count hearing yourself fart a lot afterward.
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Sounds like drunk driving on so many levels. Once, it was about impairment. Then they had definitive numbers about how much alcohol was in your system, so the level of impairment was irrelevant, they just counted the count and made the count itself illegal.
Or the numbe
No counting problem that I can see (Score:2)
So the problem isn't one of having too much data but rather unreliable correlation of that data to draw conclusions. What exactly is new here?
Re:No counting problem that I can see (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the "counting" problem they mentioned is a categorization problem. Depending how you define your categories, you get different counts. But that's because those are really different categories (they are defined differently). So the question is not really one of counting, but one of the "correct" definition of the category.
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There's another problem, and that problem is the edge cases that don't fit the statistics. Statistically speaking, smoking causes cancer and will kill you, and usually does. Despite this, there was a woman (now dead) who was, at the time, the world's oldest human. She had a cigarette every day after lunch until she died at age 112.
My own great-uncle started smoking at age 12, and stopped seventy years later when a lip cancer scared him. Ten years later HE died of old age at 92, long past the age most of us
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That reminds me to the joke where the reporter speaks with the 100 year old. The reporter asks: "What do you think why you got that old?" - "I don't drink, I don't smoke, and I do
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The version I heard was a bit longer (and I think funnier).
A reporter is interviewing a 100 year old man, and asks what he attributes his longevity to. The old man says, "Well, in the first place, I don't drink. I go to church every Sunday, and I never let a drop of alcohol touch my lips. I don't smoke and I don't drink. I eat healthy foods, and I never drink. I get plenty of exercise, and I never drink." At that point a loud crash comes from the other room. Startled, the reporter exclaims "What was that?!?
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The problem is having too much data that means too little, or not enough data that means too much.
Take the summary's example:
If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself?
If your goal is to find deaths caused by Cancer, and your statistic is "Within six months 40% of people with cancer die", is it the cancer that is killing them? How many of them are dieing in automobile accidents in that period of time? How many fell off a roof? Should a guy who drinks himself to death because he has cancer count as a death caused by cancer? What about a guy who wa
Figures (Score:2, Funny)
I finally learn how to count and now they tell me it's useless. What's next, I learn how to type and I find out nobody is reading what I write?
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tl;dr
I totally agree (Score:2)
Counting things counts for 23% less than it did last millennium.
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I don't believe that since 26% of statistics are made-up on the spot.
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Well, back in my day, statistics were made up on the spot 42% of the time. Times, they are a changing.
Count on it! (Score:2)
You can count on metrics being a problem.
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> You can count on metrics being a problem.
Right. Give me goog old American feet and pounds any day.
The Improving Economy (Score:2)
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The problem is worse there, because ALL the figures that the government uses to measure the economy have been systematically tinkered with to make the current economy look better for at least decades. Which means that time series is impossible. (They keep changing the definitions of what any particular thing measures.)
Try to find out what the current money supply is, e.g. Which measure do you use, and what does it actually measure?
The current administration is always under pressure to make the economy lo
The problem IS with statistical tests (Score:1)
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You raise an interesting point about how sometimes measuring less might mean more.
but Suppose in some parallel universe .. similar scientists had been more diligent, and conducted statistical analyses on not just X, but on 10^10 other variables. .. Same as in the other universe, they find that 99.9% of the variance in X can be predicted by the data set, but since they tested so many variables, they can't claim significance. By random chance, a lot of other variables did even better than X.
However, I thought the way science is supposed to work is that you make an a priori hypothesis about how X should behave and then try to validate it by experiment or measurement. A posteriori correlations discovered after an experiment or measurement (no matter how few or many variables measured) usually count for naught--as in the familiar adage "Correlation is not causation."
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Agreed wholeheartedly:
..it doesn't always work that way in practice. ..a statistical test should be treated with the same skepticism as the factually unsupported personal opinion of a someone with a reputation..
On the other hand (and this does not contradict your observation), reputable scientists sometimes fall in disrepute by establishment hit men. Just ask Fleischmann and Pons.
Real Numbers (Score:1)
This is why we have so called 'soft' sciences (Score:1)
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I'm only 47% sure that your post is a joke...
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We all live our lives as we wish to live them, and realize that statistics are incredibly important to making the world a better, easier place to live in. Sure, they can be wrong sometimes, but I would imagine the general public trusts them a lot less than they should actually be trusted. I mean, global warming is like 99.99999% true, same with evolution, but we still have people who don't have a clue and doubt blatant facts because they don't understand things like the specific heat capacity of water, or that evolution isn't globs of crap off the ground suddenly turning into animals and people.
Sure, the numbers can sometimes be wrong, but they are not wrong 75% of the time. Not even 50% or 25%, but less. And yes, sometimes we are further off, but it is rare. Should we really ignore important numbers because their is a small chance they are wrong? I am not saying anyone should change everything about their lives due to a single number, but common, this is a bit crazy. I am not trying to be debatative here, just saying hey, it is what it is.
A wise man once said that 99% of Statistics are made up on the spot...
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A wise man once said that 99% of Statistics are made up on the spot...
Hrmm. I always thought it was 87%
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Well, 93% of all people think so. But 86% of them are wrong.
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A wise man once said that 99% of Statistics are made up on the spot...
Hrmm. I always thought it was 87%
Well another one said it was 54.9834%, but they all claim to be experts, so who really knows?
Re:How about this (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't disagree, but, it cuts both ways. I think the article has a point... the numbers only have meaning in context.
If I tell you "X people die every year from being shot, in their home, with their own gun", that tells you something. It evokes images of burglars or irresponsible people playing. It SOUNDS like a statement about how safe or dangerous it is to have a gun in your own house.
However, if my number "X" includes suicides, well, then how much of a statement about the relative danger of owning a gun am I making? How about if I can find no link between owning a gun and committing suicide?
Clearly the statement is correct, "shot, in their home, with their own gun" but, even so, its misleading if you then use the numbers wrong.
Take texting while driving. The claim is 900 deaths a year. How do they come at that number? Even better, how big is that number? 900 sounds like a lot.. However... its less than the estimated number of serial murder victims in the US. Overall driving deaths are more like 40,000 a year. Context is everything. If I said "about 1 driving death in 40 is related to txting while driving" thats suddenly a lot smaller, yet, represents the same data.
frankly, I tend to think a LOT of statistics are meaningless. NY state enacted a law against handhed phone use while driving. It resulted in a 70% decrease in OBSERVED use. There was no decrease at all in accident rate.
What this tells me is, someone really believed that this was going to make a difference, came up with numbers and statistics and, in reality, the one little item that he picked out had about as much bearing on accident rates as the price of butter in bangladesh does.
Much of the time statistics are used to just bullshit and make it look like we aren't playing blindfolded darts when we make public policy.
-Steve
Re:How about this (Score:4, Funny)
had about as much bearing on accident rates as the price of butter in Bangladesh does.
Thanks, now I have to check the price of butter in Bangladesh to see whether it's safe to drive home, you insensitive clod!
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Take texting while driving. The claim is 900 deaths a year. How do they come at that number? Even better, how big is that number? 900 sounds like a lot.. However... its less than the estimated number of serial murder victims in the US. Overall driving deaths are more like 40,000 a year. Context is everything. If I said "about 1 driving death in 40 is related to txting while driving" thats suddenly a lot smaller, yet, represents the same data.
Just to play devil's advocate, "1 in 40" sounds like a lot bigger
Re:How about this (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager that the 1 in 40 people who've died from texting while driving came out of a sample of 1 in 40 drivers who don't put enough importance into paying attention to the road. So, take away texting drivers, and you'll still have 1 in 40 people dying because they were adjusting their radio one station at a time without looking up, or rolling up the rear-passenger window by hand because they don't have power windows.
I don't think texting while driving has increased accidents, I just think it's made it easier to point out who the stupid drivers are.
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If you really want to blame anyone, blame the handset manufacturers determined to ram button-free plastic slabs down everyone's throats. It's one thing to hold a phone in one hand and navigate its keypad with your thumb by touch, maybe stealing a quick glance at the display for a fraction of a second once or twice in a minute. It's another matter entirely to try interacting with a tiny button-free plastic brick that somehow manages to ignore your intentional gestures, yet instantly reacts to even the tinies
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So you've returned the handset to the supplier and requested a replacement with one of a different model? Or even different manufacturer.
(Probably not - doesn't sound like it.)
I have like Nokias for years ; I'm less than entirely happy with my current Nokia (which is starting to misbehave anyway), so I think I'll be telling my servants, the cellphone company, that I want a non-touchscreen phone next time. If Nokia don't supply one, or they don't supply it ; they lose my business. I believe it's called custo
Re:How about this (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, the irony of using a statistic to prove that statistics are meaningless.
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However, if my number "X" includes suicides, well, then how much of a statement about the relative danger of owning a gun am I making? How about if I can find no link between owning a gun and committing suicide?
Clearly the statement is correct, "shot, in their home, with their own gun" but, even so, its misleading if you then use the numbers wrong.
I don't think I disagree with your overall point, but I do have a quibble with this. I think there's reason to believe that owning a gun makes it more likely that you will commit suicide. Suicidal thoughts are not unusual, and suicide attempts usually fail. Becoming suicidal is often in part a response to a sudden crisis. People usually don't plan to lose their jobs, or get dumped by their romantic partners, or so on, but sooner or later, something as upsetting as those things happens to anyone. If you're h
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I will resist the urge to mod you down for failing to actually READ what the poster wrote and respond instead.
You are disputing a point that the poster DID NOT MAKE. He did not say their was no connection between owning a gun and suicides. Only that if you cannot find a link between owning a gun and commiting suicide then including suicide deaths by guns in a statistic saying owning a gun makes it likelier for you to die is not useful.
"Becoming suicidal is often in part a response to a sudden crisis"
No it
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No, I am disputing the poster's point. I think that someone who owns a gun and attempts suicide is more likely to die in the attempt than someone who doesn't own a gun and attempts suicide.
I am not an expert, and I don't have numbers to back this up. I'm just speculating.
I'm not sure why you're objecting to my usage of "suicidal." I think it's a pretty standard usage. [wiktionary.org] My point was that people don't know in advance they're going to become suicidal -- and in that case, I'm basing that on personal experiences.
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Feel free to do the research. I think what you'll find is that people who want to kill themselves...kill themselves. The presence or absence of a gun does nothing to change that.
There are places with high suicide rates and low gun ownership rates. The reverse is also true.
Ultimately, what you'll discover is that once a person makes up their mind to suicide, they do it. They almost always succeed. They'll use a gun if they have one but if they don't, they'll use other means and be about as successful.
Pe
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... then if you decide to shoot yourself with the pistol in the safe in the living room.
quibbleman to the rescue: Just make sure your safe is too small for you to fit inside and you'll be alright.
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Ok, I was being a bit of a coward. I read a great article from some issue of playboy back in the 80s that I found in my fathers porn stash many years ago. As such, I can't quote it, attribute the author, and any statistics from the article are AT BEST fuzzy memories.
What I do remember is the author absolutely lambasting a study on handgun violence that made a very similar claim. The author of the article pointed out 3 specific flaws, I don't remember what evidence he cited but... my memory this:
1) He claime
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The claim is 900 deaths a year. How do they come at that number?
I remember reading that. It was from an online poll, starting with "Are you currently driving?" followed by 40 more questions. If you answered 'yes' to #1 and didnt complete #40, it assumed you were killed while texting. Hey I was convinced enough to give up by question 5!
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You have a point about statistics, but I still think there is some importance to them. Take your example, for example, how many close calls have texting drivers caused? how many people have had to swerve out of the way? These kinds of questions can't be easily answered, but are still important. The studies done of texting while driving in driving simulators have shown that it makes a slight increase in accidents, but a dramatic decrease in driving performance. If everyone texted while they drove, there wo
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Thanks for raising the issue about guns, statistics, and perceptions.
True Statistic: A gun in the home is more likely to be used to KILL someone residing in the home than it is to KILL a criminal intruder.
This is a perfect example of how someone takes a fact, and twists it into a misperception. In this case, the idea that a gun in the home is more of a danger to the occupants than it is worth as a weapon of self defense. The folks who formulated and propagated this statistic typically don't mention the f
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Much of the time statistics are used to just bullshit and make it look like we aren't playing blindfolded darts when we make public policy.
And that explains not reading the bill among other things. Oh wait, they are in it for Good Government.
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What about cases where the numbers are right, but they could easily support a wrong conclusion?
For an example, take the current oil spill. If you look at it statistically, the BP estimate they stubbornly cling to is 5,000 barrels a day, and some other mainstream estimates range between 55,000 and 75,000 BPD. You could use some pretty sophisticated analytic math to decide if BP's estimates were more on the fringe than the criers of doom on the opposite fringe claiming it's a million bar
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No, sir, "global warming" (and I assume you mean AGW) is either true or it isn't. There is no 50% or 80% with facts. The same for evolution (and I assume by that you mean "origin of life"). Either
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Tell that to Schrödinger's cat. :-)
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I can't. His wave function ran away when I opened up the box. I've left out some potential wells as a trap, but I've caught nothing but a few stray electrons.
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There is no 50% or 80% with facts.
This is true, however the problem is that many things people talk about are not discrete hypotheses, but rather conglomorations of hypotheses/theories/facts.
The theory that there are three blue people sitting in my office right now could be called "false", or it could be called "50% true" if you're willing to accept that it's based on two distinct ideas (1: There are three people, 2: They are blue (the former is true, the latter is not)).
That's obviously a ridiculously oversimplified example, but it's impor
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Either evolution is how life began or it isn't.
Evolution makes no claim whatsoever about how life began. That's usually called abiogenesis.
Stopped reading after that.
Re: (Score:1)
Global warming is not a tautology. It is simple really. Calculate global heat content. Is it higher than last year? Is it getting steadily higher over the past few decades? If yes, then yes. If no, then no. But yes. Anyone who has a clue as to the density of water compared to air, and who has a clue about the heat capacity per mass of air compared to per mass of water, will understand the oceans hold more than 100x the heat of the air, and if they are getting 1 degree warmer, that is more significant th