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?
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Notes -
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 room to ask about whether, even as the crime rate-per-population has gone down dramatically, the rate-per-potential-exposure has been less changed or has gone up. As Scott says, "We’re a safetyist culture"; we avoid risks more than we used to. We also have more attractive alternatives to risks - where I would play sports in the street or at worst play video games in person with the neighborhood kids, my children go to the rock-climbing gym or play networked video games with their friends farther away. I grew up in a residential area where once I got old enough I could walk to a convenience store, perhaps past some sketchy houses; my kids are growing up in a giant suburb where it wouldn't matter if the houses were sketchy because there's nothing they could get to on foot regardless.
On the other hand, the answer might just be "no, the rate-per-potential-exposure has gone down too". Or it might be that this isn't a sufficiently well-defined metric, because in a big country there's always someplace where it's just too dangerous for an innocent person to go and someplace else where it's perfectly safe and there's no obvious way to decide how to weight those places when averaging.
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?Just the opposite.
murders / population = murders / exposures * exposures / population. Ifmurder / populationis constant whilemurder / exposuresincreases thenexposures / population, the exposure rate, must be decreasing inversely.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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