Thanks to Captain Ed, I think my “gypsy” post isn’t as blatant as it could have been.
I gotta love all the stats being offered as “proof” for whatever statements they being cited to support. Anybody else out there have a statistics course crammed down their throat?
You can’t tell what a statistic means without the context with which it is calculated.
If I say I got a 100 on a test, that sounds pretty good until you realize the test was 250 points. Maybe I got the second best grade in the class, but if there were only two people in the class, not such a big deal. A drug may increase a particular response/or whatever by more than 500% over a placebo. If it is an increase of say 5 in 10,000 as opposed to 1 in 10,000, so what. And so on…
I, for one, don’t know what to make of anybody’s stats without knowing how they’re calculated. If you’re using statistics that you’ve have just read somewhere and you don’t know how there were calculated, it doesn’t really validate your argument, does it? Any newspaper reporter can write whatever he wants. If you don’t know where the stats came from, how do you know how valid they are?
How the hell is Captain Ed posting, much less starting threads, if he isn’t registered? I can’t even post a reply to a message without typing in my username and password.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - Arthur Dent
To belabor my point about statistics, I’ll just wonder aboutthe OP.
Let’s see-‘about 1,700,000’ (that’s 2 significant figures) interracial crimes, of which 1,276,030 involved whites… narrowed it down to 30 people out of over a million, pretty good precision-what was the standard error of that stat (1.7 million, but down to 30 people who were victims)? Round all the numbers (the same way) or don’t.
Who determines whether a victim or perpetrator is white or black? What is a violent crime? Is the same crime by a white reported as ‘violent’ at the same frequency as one committed by a black? Has the standard been the same since 1972, although you’re citing '94 and then '97? Does an arrest count, or is it convictions only (explain ‘involved’ please)? Who makes the decision as to what race is involved? What defines a ‘hate-crime’ and who decides this? Is it the same definition in all states and statistics? Are these “stats” reported in the same uniform manner across all states, since you quote a National Survey? I would imagine that Alabama might be more conservative with race crimes than California. Is a black on white crime reported the same way as a white on black crime in all states? Those being just questions off the top of my head when I’m presented by ‘statistical facts’.
Please don’t tell me that the Justice Dept. checked every single police arrest report in the entire U.S. for their survey to make sure that the reports were in accordance to some uniform standard. Statistics are a very useful tool in the right context, but they should be understood before being bandied about to make arbitrary point.
There’s a major difference between you and “Captain” Ed. You learned that you were wrong about something, and you admitted it, and I think that you won’t make the same mistake twice.