June 3 - Hiatus and Statistics

Well, that was a nice hiatus. I expect that posts will be fewer and farther between, now, as other aspects of life have intruded on free time.

Earlier in the series, you may have read some debate on the merits of popular gun ownership. Joey Blades indicated that he did not want to use statistics because they can be used to say anything. I don't entirely agree with him, but I can appreciate his position much more when I read things like this from the Austin American Statesman:

The complaint was triggered, in part, by a series of American-Statesman articles in 2004 revealing that from 1998 to 2003, police were twice as likely to use force against blacks as against whites and 25 percent more likely to use force against Hispanics than against whites.

Those statistics stood there, alone, with no further explanation. One could reasonably infer from those statistics that Austin police are a bunch of racist sadists. But there is no context to make this judgment. If police were twice as likely to interact with Blacks and 25% more likely to interact with Hispanics than Caucasians, then the response to this sentence should be a big, "ho hum" and an investigation as to why police interact with those demographies more is in order. No wonder Joey hates the use of statistics for rational argument.

This is one of the greatest failings of the news services. They do not inform. When I find some time, I'll try to find out if Austin police are, indeed, a bunch of racist sadists.