Rex Kerr
2 min readMay 5, 2024

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Yes you are.

Giving an incomplete set of statistics that cannot be used to make any valid statistical judgment is a misuse of statistics.

Dogs kill 10x more people per year in the U.S. than do venomous snakes. Would you rather have a pet dog or a pet venomous snake?

Your odds of being killed by a mass shooter is about one in a million. Your odds of being killed by a horse is about one in ten thousand. Would you rather be in a park with a horse or with a mass shooter?

Women are more likely to be abused or killed by a man who they know than a stranger. Would you rather meet a bear in the woods, or a man you're friends with?

There are ten times more suicides than homicides in national parks. You shouldn't worry about danger from other people, you should worry you will kill yourself!

If a question is a matter of conditional probability, and you don't give the conditions, you are misusing statistics. You even recognized this in the predicted set of arguments and counterarguments.

Finally, you say that women are more likely to survive an encounter with a bear than with a "strange" man in the woods, but this one I think isn't even true, much less true but misleading. I guess it depends what you mean by "strange" and "woods".

If you want to explain why women would make one decision, that's fine. That's a matter of psychology, and part of human psychology is being bad with certain types of risk estimation. But don't offer statistics that lead women to make bad judgments based on partial information and say you're "not misusing statistics"!

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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