site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3720 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

4
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Increase in murders

What numbers are we looking at here? Googling around the murder rates per capita for the US as a whole during the 1920s and 30s seem to generally trend higher than murder rates today, but those are just the easiest ones I've found and I could accept the methodology has changed to such an extent it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Can you share the data you've found? I was just speculating in my post and I could accept that murders were higher in the 1920s than now. Especially because people who were stabbed or shot would be more likely to die without a 911 system and quality medical care.

For the 1920s and 1930s, I was just going off of this which is just the source from the Wikipedia page.Since that data was from the NCHS, I then compared it to the rates for 2021 and 2022 from their dashboard, which showed 2021 and 2022 as being a bit lower than the averages for the 20s and 30s.

The numbers I saw from the first link seemed ballpark with the other ones I could find (The FBI crime data explorer only goes back to 1985 and tends to show lower rates across the board than the NCHS data, but is in the same ballpark and trends in the same direction by year).

Once again, just what I could find quickly off Google, not a rigorous analysis.

And yeah, not a commentary on rates of violence, just in terms of folks going in the ground.

Thanks! That data is so weird. What happened in 1904? The murder rate jumped from 1.3 to 4.9 just 4 years later! I suppose records from those years weren't great.

It looks like in the Post War period, the murder rate has jumped around a lot and we're sort of in the middle right now.

I'll go ahead and say that I was wrong. Although murder does have a significant affect on U.S. life expectancy, the change in the murder rate since 1920 hasn't lowered life spans.

Modern trauma care turns what would have been murders in the 70s into aggravated assaults. There's a downward trend from medical improvements.

That seems highly relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of violent crime, but less relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of life expectancy.

Unless the argument is the life expectancy lost by the increased # of aggravated assaults outweighs the life expectancy gained by the decreased # of outright murders. Though I would not phrase that as life expectancy lost due to increase in murders.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats