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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2688 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate. the people who are getting exposed must be making up the difference. Who? Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?

If the murder rate stays constant, but “rate per potential exposure” gets worse, someone is getting exposed at a higher rate.

Just the opposite. murders / population = murders / exposures * exposures / population. If murder / population is constant while murder / exposures increases then exposures / population, the exposure rate, must be decreasing inversely.

Shouldn’t it be strictly easier to tell which neighborhoods have turned into death traps?

Is it? I know there are sites that give neighborhoods "walkability" scores, but at least the first one I pulled up is only giving a theoretical number based on the mass transit availability, distances to the nearest grocer/cafe/school, etc; I'd have no idea how to find an actual number of people who walk down a particular street (or who drive in a particular area - the only armed robberies I found out about first hand were at a stoplight and in a parking lot) on an average day.

Whoops. I was trying to gesture at the conditional probability P(M|E). If P(M&E) was constant/dropped, but P(M|E) went up, then yeah, P(E) must have dropped.

I don’t know why it dropped. Maybe the walkability scores really worked, and following them is enough to dodge almost all crime. Seems unlikely. Maybe law enforcement drove most criminals into hives of scum and villainy, and now word of mouth is enough to keep tourists from visiting Skid Row. Maybe COVID killed all the criminals first. Any number of stupid reasons.

But people aren’t acting like P(E) has improved, are they?

I am tempted to argue that this is a media phenomenon. That if people weren’t getting pictures of immigrants piped to their phones 24/7, they wouldn’t feel like P(E) was so high. I’m aware that this flatters my own biases, so I’ll try to discount it, but surely something like this is possible.

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