Originally Posted by
Biomega
The issue isn't that people are trying to pretend 9/11 (or the Holocaust) didn't happen - it's that these events are such massive STATISTICAL outliers they would skew the perception of data if they were universally included. Same reason you don't include WWII in statistics about gun violence, for example.
To illustrate, say you were looking at statistics about violence against Jews. If you include the Holocaust in that (which was, to be sure, a MASSIVE act of violence against Jews) then you also diminish all the other, post-Holocaust violence to be far less statistically significant; what would a Pittsburgh Shooting of 11 people really say in the face of 6 million deaths? It would become a blip, a flicker, a statistical irrelevancy as a singular event. But it's not irrelevant, and it's more than a blip. It's a frighteningly significant event IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT - i.e. one that looks at a subset of violence against Jews that excludes the Holocaust. Not because you pretend it didn't happen or wasn't a shatteringly terrible event, but because it skews the perspective on other events.
Statistics are a very tricky thing, because you can set them up in a myriad of ways, and each of those can over- or underemphasize certain aspects. And though an experienced statistician (or any scholar versed in statistical data analysis) could easily dissect such statistics, the vast majority of people are not exactly prone to be doing that. They are impressed by charts and curves, and it's important that we make it as easy as possible for those people to visualize what's relevant in the discussion when we bring up a statistic.
Of course, it's not always easy to just arrive at THE perfect solution for a statistical representation. There's so many factors involved. Take rape charges, for example. A few years ago, Sweden (I think?) was in the press for having staggeringly high numbers of rape; but closer examination revealed that the reason for this was in large part due to the way the statistics counted rapes - they would count every. single. incidence. of rape; so if it was, say, a marriage in which the husband raped his wife hundreds of times over 20 years, then in Sweden, that would be hundreds of counts of rape entered into the statistic - while in many other countries, this would all be collated into a single rape "case", and counted only once. There's arguments for and against both ways of counting, and it's hard to objectively decide which one is more useful for the task at hand. "That task" being, of course, very easily abused by political agendas, and represented in a way that seems to reinforce their particular angle.
That's why it's very dangerous to arrive at easy conclusions and generalizations. I get that Don Lemon in this case was (presumably) trying to emphasize that "immigrants" are a minority cause of violence and death within the USA. In the big picture, radical Muslim extremists, for example, have killed or injured a laughably minute number of Americans compared to how many were killed or injured by other Americans. But to put the "white male" emphasis on these statistics is another kind of bias, and quite problematic in its own right - not necessarily because it is a misrepresentation of statistical data (which does, for the most part, confirm that less people have been killed in the US by acts of Islamist terrorism than by acts of domestic terrorism committed by white male perpetrators) but because it skews the PERCEPTION of that data. Data doesn't tell you everything right away. You need a lot of work and analysis to understand data, and that's where it's all-too tempting to fall into easy generalizations and statistical "creativity".
Personally, I think the biggest threat to American lives is no sinister terrorist plot or even tribalism and bigotry - it's a fundamentally broken political system that fosters these things in the first place. And I guess you could blame the "white males" for that one, if you were so inclined, because there certainly are a lot of them in that system - but I don't think that them being white or them being male is where the problem lies. They're connected, to be sure, but if anything, they are more symptomatic than causative.
Yet another Timewalking loot post ( As directed by GM)
Opened timewalking Cache before hotfix
Season 4... Just old dungeons and new ilvl?
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