Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Neo knows math.


Blogging Tory "Neo Conservative" would appreciate it if you could just get a grip, OK?

Another one bites the dust

Just like all the recent hysteria over Taser related deaths... it turns out the supposed rising tide of hate crimes in North America... is a myth.

Less than 10,000 total hate crimes of any kind in an entire year, in a country of over 300 million people? Only 7,330 known hate crime offenders?

That means that hate crimes are a drop in the bucket. They are the least of our problems.

The two-thousandths of one percent (.002%) of Americans who committed hate crimes against anyone in 2006, including Protestants (35 complete losers) clearly need help.

While we're playing around with numbers I have one final factoid for the Taser Death Squad Hysterical Society.

There have been 16 taser related deaths in Canada over the last four years.

That works out to 4 instances per year
... which, my paranoid friends, is statistically insignificant.

Employing exactly the same analysis, Neo would like to point out that, sure, while just over 70 Canadian troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan, that's a drop in the bucket compared to Canada's population of over 33,000,000, so, really, will all you "statistically insignificant" war widows and grieving mothers and heartbroken orphans just quit your pathetic, snivelly whining and shut the fucking hell up about it, fer Chrissake!?!?

If you have a problem with that, I'm sure you can find Neo here. You should probably knock loudly -- he might not be answering the door for the next little while.

9 comments:

MgS said...

Low frequency doesn't make hate crimes any less real to the victims.

Ti-Guy said...

I don't know what "myth of rising hate crimes" he's referring to. I only believed that the crimes were being better reported.

In any case, neo-cretin's link was to Rightwingnews so I stopped paying attention there.

Who cares what that primitive redneck has to say?

E in MD said...

That works out to 4 instances per year... which, my paranoid friends, is statistically insignificant.

Unless of course one of those 4 incidents happened to be your brother, your son, your mother or your dad.

I seem to remember posting in my own blog some time last year about this very same topic. The statistical likelihood of various causes of death.

By this logic we should then also completely ignore terrorism. Less than 20,000 people have died in the last fifty years in terrorism related incidents and most of those were DOMESTIC terrorists. Between 1990 and 1997 only 116 Americans died in terrorist attacks.

Over 43000 people died last year in the US alone from traffic accidents. That's over double the number that have died from terrorism in fifty years and that's just in one year. And it's STILL statistically insignificant ( 43000 / 300,000,000 = 0.000143333 or 0.01% ). Hell, over 245,000 have died in car crashes since 9/11 and that's only 0.08%.

By statistically significant I would assume he means anything under 10% of the population, which would require a about 9000 9/11 level attack every year or a 9/11 every 1.05 seconds.

Yet American's will spend over a trillion dollars on the statistically remote chance that Americans will die in terrorism. We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here after all!

Of course, in the time it took me to type that 180 people died of various causes from violent assault to staph infections. Guess we should ignore that too.

Southern Quebec said...

According to the Mounties own records -- 563 people tasered -- 4 dead. Not statistically insignificant. 3 out 4 people tasered are unarmed.
And, Mr. MacAdamia -- statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics!

Niles said...

He's just following in Day's footprints, a role model to him and his ilk. After all, if Day can roll his eyes at the Vancouver airport taser killing and ask where is people's outrage at drunk drivers, who kill SO many more than taser armed Horsemen, why shouldn't M. Neo be blase about it? He's got his talking point. I'm sure it keeps him warm at night.

Unknown said...

Statistician (that being me) weighing in: "Statistically" is just thrown on the front of "insignificant" so it looks scientific. "Statistically insignificant" means something very specific, notably that a specific test is being done to compare the observed levels to another level (either a null hypothesis, or another set of data), a p-value was produced, and compared to a predetermined significance level. Here a sensible thing to do would be to compare the death rate being observed (4 in 563, on the one set of numbers provided), to the industry reported death rate during taser use (likely tiny). Is 4/563 signifcantly different than, say, a 1/1000 promise? Yes, yes it is, p-value=0.005 (exact binomial test).

"Statistically insignificant" is not the proper term to use to describe something that happens only rarely. Not ever, let alone in this case. Then the term is "rare", or just plain "insignificant", although I hear the latter as a statistical statement (but that's my issue).

Also "4 dead" isn't even a statistic, any more than "I have two shoes" is a statistic; another pet peeve of mine. Stats are all about comparisons. Counts, percentages, those are things that lead to statistics, not stats in and of themselves. If something isn't placed in appropriate context, it's not a statistic.

Lindsay Stewart said...

terrorism is a hate crime, no? insignificant you say, thanks halls of macadimwittery, bring our troops home now.

E in MD said...


terrorism is a hate crime, no?.

By pretty shaved ape, at 4:33 PM


Yeah I'm pretty sure blowing up because you don't like their politics or what have you is pretty much the ultimate hate crime.

But I'm sure given the right wing's opposition to any hate crime legislations, they'll probably yell at you for creating 'special categories' of victims or something.

Unknown said...

"By statistically significant I would assume he means anything under 10% of the population, which would require a about 9000 9/11 level attack every year or a 9/11 every 1.05 seconds."

A 9/11 every 1.05 seconds? Yeah, go with that, hillbilly.