Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
1–10 of 164 posts
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#2Author asks:
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?"
But is that the best comparison?
What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different disease. So here, I think it would be more informative to have comparative study done across countries, societies rather than this distraction.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention. So research into any low probability disease should be ended because there bigger fish to fry. I think we can do both.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#3Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
[deleted]
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#4Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
He's saying that things that have such a low occurrence that they're indistinguishable from statistical outliers are not good targets for generalized public policy, since the benefits are not provable.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#5Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
I don't understand your question. Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe. But how does that help anything?
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#6Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
Sort of; the author does go onto say how R&D could help "solve" both mental illness and mass shootings. There is definitely a cap on what can be done, so the suggestion is to bake the cost into issues that are already more statistically large and probably solvable.
Theoretically, he does compare to other countries, as the statistic is a rounding error -- not statistically relevant.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#7Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
I don't understand your question. Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe. But how does that help anything?
"Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe."
History indicates otherwise.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#8"Public policy should not be dictated by emotions."
But the media knows that a large share of their "news business" is driven by emotion. And so here we are all thinking about mass shootings.
And we know the media has an enormous influence on politics. So add this all up and what do we have?
A terrible tragedy that affects a small community but also a lot of tangential effects, remote onlookers, politicians and an enterprising "media business".
I have a cousin who as a child was a student in a narrowly averted early grade school classroom mass shooting. Honestly, when I first heard about this incident in Connecticut I thought of him. I can only wonder what he thought about when he read about this incident. When it hits close to home, there might be hesistation to even talk about these things, they are so horrible. We might block them out. We might tell the children to close their eyes. We might try to pretend it never happened.
But for the media and the "news business", it's a different ballgame.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your question. Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe. But how does that help anything?
"Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe." History indicates otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe
I can't downvote you, but that's a useless comment and you know it.
Re: Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
#10Author asks: "I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?" But is that the best comparison? What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries? When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different diseas…
I don't understand your question. Mass shootings seem to be more rare in e.g. Europe. But how does that help anything?
"If you look at a per capita rate, the rate of multiple-victim public shootings in Europe and the United States over the last 10 years have been fairly similar to each other. A couple of years ago you had a couple of big shootings in Finland. About two-and-a-half years ago you had a big shooting in the U.K., 12 people were killed.
"You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany."
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Lott-guns-Connecticut-shooti...