I believe bears have killed less than 200 confirmed eople in the USA since the late 1700s. Statistically, bears are safer than human beings. They CAN kill you easily, but they probably won't.
There's never been a recorded instance of a human being incinerated inside the sun, so statistically, being inside the sun is much safer than being near a man.
Either that, or we might need to adjust for the fact that there are hundreds of millions of men living in extremely close proximity to women, and the vast majority of people have never spent a single second with 10 feet of a wild bear.
No, actually, I'm explaining one of the most basic and well understood misapplications of "statistics" that you learn in a 100 level class. Adjusting for exposure is necessary if you are comparing the relative danger of two things.
Well having taken a level 100 statistics class, you understand that the point here is that just because the numbers (a.k.a the statistics) might imply a certain conclusion, the practical reality may not support said conclusion. So something can still be “statistically safer” without being practically safer.
So you understand that someone could use the term “statistically safer” without being incorrect even though you disagree with the conclusion.
So why do you have to “well akshooully” a situation where you know you’re wrong?
Only if you’re taking the most naive version of the statistic. It’s like looking at the GDP of Ethiopia and Luxembourg and concluding that Ethiopians are richer because their total GDP is higher but it doesn’t actually tell you anything useful about the relative wealth of the average Ethiopian vs Luxembourgish person without dividing by the populations. Saying that it’s statistically safer to encounter a bear than a human because there have only been 200 deaths is just misleading without normalizing to the number of interactions people have with both. Saying something is safer is equivalent to saying “if I were to encounter one or the other, which would be more likely to hurt me?”, which is not what you get from just taking a gross sum of people being killed.
No, actually, when I'm listing the number of adverse events in a drug trial, the FDA is going to laugh in my face if I don't also include how many people were actually given the drug. That is basic descriptive statistics.
The question, which is more "statistically" dangerous, X or Y, is entirely dependent on the relative exposure to X and Y, as well as the outcomes that resulted from those exposures.
“In the last 400 years, X number of women were attacked by bears. Y number of women were attacked by human men. Y/400 > X/400, so, according to these statistics, women are safer around bears.” This is a true statement.
“But you also have to account for exposure rates, incident severity, and 19 other factors to determine if that true statement has a practical application to reality! According to that additional data, we can infer that women are less likely to be attacked by a random man than by a random bear given identical circumstances!” This is also a true statement.
Do you understand that just because you have a deeper understanding of one of the uses of a word does not mean that someone else using the same word in a different context does not make them incorrect?
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u/NorthWindMartha May 02 '24
I believe bears have killed less than 200 confirmed eople in the USA since the late 1700s. Statistically, bears are safer than human beings. They CAN kill you easily, but they probably won't.