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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2598 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

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https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=89120&post_id=187622533

Anyone see Scott's latest post on crime stats and have a significant disagreement with it? It feels culture war worthy and I'd like to discuss it, but I don't feel like I know the counter viewpoints well.

I think there's an inherent weakness to these population-wide metrics. Let's say there's a gang-infested Gotham city with 1M people and there's a suburb next to it called Boring Creek where another 1M people live. And let's say there is 1000 murders per year in Gotham and 1 murder per year in Boring Creek. Statistically, we have 1001/2M = 0.5 per thousand murder rate. Now, let's assume due to Batman's effort in Gotham, the murder rate there decreased to 500. While Boring Creek voted to defund the police and convert it to "social crisis nonviolent intervention consultants" and now their murder rate is 10 per year. Now we have 510/2M = 0.25 per thousand murder rate, or half as bad as before. Technically true, but Gotham is still a hellscape with 500 murders per year, and Boring Creek's resident chance of being murdered is now an order of magnitude larger than before. So, if the radio host of Boring Creek Patriotic Voice says the town is going to hell, and the host of More Facts Than You Would Ever Know substack says we're winning the war on crime like never before and the Patriotic Voice are just innumerate idiots who don't care about the facts, who among them is right?

I mean, it's good that murder rate over the whole nation goes down. But how does it go down is important too. If it goes down in a way that out of 5000 shootings in Gotham previously only 4000 survived, and now due to advances in emergency medicine 4500 survive, does that really help me that much, if I live in Boring Creek? And even if the gang on Gotham are living in mortal fear of Batman and actually are shooting each other less - does that really help me that much, if I live in Boring Creek?

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