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Record number of environmental activists murdered

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#91

Post by watwut »

IMTDb wrote: post #28
cenophor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is murder, not people falling off the cliff because of some accidents. There is probably nothing logically wrong with that question, and you are probably right that there is a correlation. But... seriously?

Yes, seriously. The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday". The typical way of computing "dangerosity" is through a ratio. Eg: number of death / kilometer for transportation systems, number of injury / game for sports, ... Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and di…

> The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday".

Why would that be a real question? The activism itself should not be life threatening activity. If the amount of killed activists is proportionally the same every year ... then there is still have real issue.

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#92

Post by yunohn »

rendall wrote: post #86
yunohn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Not sure I want to even try replying to this uninformed mess of a comment. I’ve never been more sure of the sad HN bubble.

> They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps Is there an increase, though? The BBC has sadly become known to be rather loose with facts. The answer to the upstream question here would let us know if there is an increase and what kind . Absolute? Relative? How big of a problem is this, really, or is it more of the BBC fomenting noise and anxiety for clicks. We're trying to ge…

You know what? Sure, let’s assume the BBC is “FUDing for clicks”. We’ll ignore the source report, and general common sense.

Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on? And that your statistical skills somehow matter to the real world activists dying?

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#93

Post by mark_l_watson »

markenqualitaet wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely about environment issues, but there's a TV show with something similar as a premise - Continuum . A crime solving drama/sci-fi, where the protagonist is a time traveler coming to our times from year 2070-ish, time when the world is ruled by a Corporate Congress, consisting of thinly veiled allusions to well-known corporations of today. In between all the action and emotional drama, it also delivers some…

Do you recommend it? It's one of the few scifi shows I haven't seen but stumble upon from time to time. It seems a bit low-budget and oldschool TV (pre-breaking bad quality of TV).

Yes, I liked it

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#94

Post by markenqualitaet »

rendall wrote: post #68
ArchieMaclean wrote: post #3

How does this compare to the growth in the number of environmental activists overall? Edit: it was pointed out below that it's probably more influenced by an increase in environmentally damaging activities such as logging. Edit 2: Yes, I think that murdering peaceful, innocent protestors is a disgusting act. I'm just questioning the article's use of statistics

> How does this compare to the growth in the number of environmental activists overall? It's a legitimate question. Any answer other than environmental activists have increased/decreased by x is not an answer to the question. If it's an emotionally loaded response (e.g. Seriously? People are murdered while you quibble! ), it's a non-sequitur.

No, it's a cynical question, which derails the conversation into an arbitrary technical debate. It implies/hints at/suggests there is methological issue. Murder is not some statistical event you have to expect, account for.

Language/communication doesn't work the way you argue here. There is context. OP's question would be valid and common for science on e.g. the connection of total brain cancers and smartphone usage.

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#95

Post by Sebb767 »

krageon wrote: post #20
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, seriously. Number one failure in sensationalized reporting is base rate fallacy: they point out a high absolute number, implying something strange is going on, whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there. I don't mean this is the case here (I'm yet to read the article itself) - but this failure mode in reporting is so common…

I get that at some point murder becomes statistics, but I still feel the need to re-emphasize that this is murder . Not more folks getting the flu because there are more folks.

The larger point is that some (very small) percentage of people will be murdered every year. If the number of climate activists increases, the chance of one of them being murdered increases with it - possibly just by being involved in a random shooting or family drama, completely unrelated to their activism.

I agree that murder is horrible, but the article seems to try to sell that these murders are related to their activism, which is not something you can say just based on the absolute number. You need to have the ratio to compare to the last year and to the base rate in the general population to make a better statement. Without it, we can't be sure of the real cause and might try to fix this at the wrong place, leading to us to not prevent murders effectively - so yes, you need to get your statistics right, even when talking about horrible incidents.

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

playpause wrote: post #56
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, seriously. Number one failure in sensationalized reporting is base rate fallacy: they point out a high absolute number, implying something strange is going on, whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there. I don't mean this is the case here (I'm yet to read the article itself) - but this failure mode in reporting is so common…

These are murders of people. The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article. To say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders, just because you were personally interested in a number you couldn't find in the article, is crass.

I didn't say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders. I said, in my paragraph, that sensationalized articles in general (and note that I didn't say this one definitely is in this category) often don't report the base rate, because it would reveal they're reporting a non-story. And I said that to counter cenophor's objection to ArchieMaclean's question, by pointing out it's pretty much the first question one should be asking when discussing an article/report that doesn't provide that number.

> The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article.

It wasn't, at least not directly. The numbers I saw are:

- 227 activists killed in 2020, the titular record number

- 4 activits / week on average being killed since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015[0]

You can tease out some insight from deconstructing the average (e.g. the 2020 number is above the average), but not much really. Not enough to tell you whether something has changed about this situation.

Also, please don't assume people asking for more clarity and better data are ignoring the human life context of the story.

--

There seems to be an error in the reported context of that figure - Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, but signed in April 2016 and became effective from November 2016 - per - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement.

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#98

Post by drran »

kleiba wrote: post #4

I know we're not drawing from a random distribution here, but presumably, the number of environmentalists has also risen dramatically in recent years.

How number of activists is linked to number of killers?

In case of rabbits and wolves, more rabbits -> more food for wolves -> more wolves.

I fail to see the link in the case of activists and killers.

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#99

Post by djbebs »

yunohn wrote: post #92
rendall wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps Is there an increase, though? The BBC has sadly become known to be rather loose with facts. The answer to the upstream question here would let us know if there is an increase and what kind . Absolute? Relative? How big of a problem is this, really, or is it more of the BBC fomenting noise and anxiety for clicks. We're trying to ge…

You know what? Sure, let’s assume the BBC is “FUDing for clicks”. We’ll ignore the source report, and general common sense. Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on? And that your statistical skills somehow matter to the real world activists dying?

There is a diference between reporting and propaganda

Re: Record number of environmental activists murdered

#100

Post by yunohn »

djbebs wrote: post #99
yunohn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what? Sure, let’s assume the BBC is “FUDing for clicks”. We’ll ignore the source report, and general common sense. Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on? And that your statistical skills somehow matter to the real world activists dying?

There is a diference between reporting and propaganda

And what’s the propaganda according to you? What’s the goal, and who’s pushing it via the BBC?
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