FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

Take something really simple about percentages. What does 0.1% mean? Only 1 in 4 people know this means "1 in 1000".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310025/

> Gigerenzer et al show how only 25% of the general population could correctly identify 1 in 1000 as being the equivalent of 0.1%.

Take something a little bit more complex, such as the relative increase in risk vs the actual total risk. We know that most people do not understand what a 75% increase in risk means in real terms. But most people do understand a simpler explanation: of people who don't eat $THING we'd expect to see 1 person out of 1000 people over ten years developing a disease, but if 1000 people all eat $THING every day over ten years we'd expect to see about 2 people developing the disease.

See also cancer screening: (This is a good useful link that rattles through most of what I'd want to say) https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng34/evidence/expert-paper-...

“If you participate in breast screening, you will reduce your chances of dying from breast cancer in the next 10 years by 24%” versus

“If you participate in breast screening, you will reduce your chances of dying from breast cancer in the next 10 years from 37 in 10,000 to 28 in 10,000”

BMJ has more about relative vs absolute risk: https://bestpractice.bmj.com/info/toolkit/practise-ebm/under...

Here's a final example. For some time we knew members of the public couldn't do this, but we thought healthcare professionals could. Turns out that they couldn't do it either. Both groups find it much easier if you convert this into natural numbers and probability trees.

"A machine has been invented to scan a population for a disease. The machine is good but not perfect. If you have the disease there is a 90% chance it will return positive. If you do not have the disease there is a 1% chance it will return positive. About 1% of the population have the disease. Mr Smith is tested, and the test comes back positive. What's the chance Mr Smith actually has the disease?"

(This is from "Reckoning with Risk" by Gerd Gigerenzer).

Most people cannot get the right answer from this question.

If you reword the question they can.

"Think of a group of 100 people. 1 of them has a disease. The entire group is screened. The one person who has the disease tests positive. Of the 99 people who don't have the disease one person will also test positive. How many people of those who test positive have the disease?"

You can also show this as a probability tree. https://imgur.com/a/JWVQRxI

Two books I recommend are "Reckoning With Risk" and "Risk Savvy", both by Gigerenzer.

Right, so the government has all the tanks and bombs they need to blow up their own bridges and structures.

Insurgencies don't have separate infrastructure. They use yours. Blowing it up hurts you more than it hurts them.

> This has precedent. See Tianamen, Soviet Union sending the tanks to its satellite republics, the Turkey failed coup.

Rolling in tanks is purely an intimidation tactic. They're designed to be hard targets that can destroy hard targets, but insurgents don't have hard targets. They use secrecy rather than fortification. To kill them with a tank you would have to know where they are, but if you knew where they were then you could go arrest them rather than doing anything whatsoever with a tank.

And even the intimidation value can be one hell of a footgun. Everybody has seen the photos from Tienanmen square of the man standing in the way of the tanks. That kind of iconic imagery is a massive fiasco for government and a major PR win for the opposition.

> The only time the federal government can be stopped is to wait 4 years and electing a new president.

It's not just about overthrowing the government. It's about making oppressive policies more difficult to implement.

It makes it more dangerous for corrupt police to sneak around like criminals without announcing themselves or outright lynch people in the streets, because it leaves people more ability to defend themselves against petty local tyranny as well.

Also notice that there is a large racial disparity in who gun control laws restrict from having firearms.

> Allowing individuals to own AR-15 has no bearing on 'freedom' from federal attacks.

In the case of an outright insurgency it's not about defense, it's about offense. It's about capturing soft targets for their resources. Twenty guys with rifles may not be able to take on an army base, but they can take on car dealerships and hardware stores and chemical plants and then drive off with their stuff.

And the obsession with the AR-15 is wholly misplaced. It's used by some bad people because it's used by a lot of people in general. It's popular. That doesn't make it different in any meaningful way from most other rifles, and the attempts to distinguish it immediately devolve into cosmetic differences like whether it has a pistol grip or certain types of mounts for ancillary equipment.