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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Actually white heterosexual middle class males can totally appreciate these things.

Imagine what it is like to be white/asian in a country where a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by black men and where black on white crimes are 5.6 times more common than white on black crimes [1]. Imagine what it is like to be Christian when a disproportionate number of terror attacks are committed by Islamic types.

My father feels unsafe (on my behalf) when he watches various Islamic terror attacks on the news. I was in Amsterdam last week, which is sort of near Paris and Brussels (though the Dutch seem to integrate their Muslims far better), and he was worried about my safety. In reality I'm far more likely to die from drinking Belgian beer, eating a space cake and then falling into a canal.

I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way?

[1] http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race...

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Linking to a post on the website of a White Supremacist organisation such as AmRen (American Renaissance) will probably hurt your argument more than help it.

>Jared Taylor founded The New Century Foundation[0], a self-styled white supremacist think tank known primarily for American Renaissance, its online journal. The journal promotes pseudo-scientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies. - [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation

[1]: http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrori...

I don't understand - a white supremacist took a quantity from the DOJ, then took a percentage from the DOJ, and multiplied them together to get a new quantity. Does multiplication become invalid when a white supremacist does it? Or do DOJ stats become false when a racist cites them?

Please, I would like to understand your logic.

I do find it a bit scary that when I google "black on white crime", only racist sites show up. Why are only white supremacists willing to discuss this data? (Or perhaps they are all just super good at SEO.)

You don't understand why when you google a complex topic such as "crime" and then apply a narrow, racial lens to it, mostly racist organizations show up? The term "X on Y crime" is suggesting that the relevant information about people who commit crimes and are victims of crime can be summarized by the color of their skin. That's as racist of a notion as it gets.

Correct. There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. The point is not that it can be perfectly summarized by skin color, the point is that there is clearly something happening and it would be great to find out what.

Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial)

Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).

> There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it.

I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.

It's a common tactic, attack the source of data to avoid discussing the data.

In theory, we should all be able to evaluate the validity data on our own, so this tactic is dumb.

In reality, we have no practical way of doing this. So, whenever we cite a source of data, we are implicitly saying "This is a credible source for the statement is making. You can trust that they have done the work to make sure they aren't just repeating their own biases." And in the case of some organizations and people, you actually cannot say that.

If the American milk board makes a claim about the health benefits of milk, it is not a fallacy to be skeptical of that claim.

In reality we have no practical way to take the DOJ's data table to find the number of black on white crimes?

Let me introduce you to data science. First I'll read the numnbers in row 2 column 2 and row 2 column 5. Then I'll plug them into ipython:

    $ ipython
    ...
    In [4]: 4091971*0.137
    Out[4]: 560600.027

Do the same for row 3 col 2 and row 3 col 4:

    In [6]: 955800 * 0.104
    Out[6]: 99403.2

Looks like the article was right after all.

Whew, that was hard. Took all the skills I learned in my math Ph.D. to finish the job. Just lucky I didn't have to break out Hadoop. If I wasn't a professional statistician I wouldn't have had a prayer.

That's not data science, that's middle school multiplication.

Data science would be trying to find out why and putting it into context, especially if there are variables in play that aren't shown by a cursory look. Which a white supremacist has little interest in.

Nobody wants to study why because they'd be labeled as racists and lose their job the moment any group of crybullies discovered what they were researching. So it goes largely untouched, which only does the actual racists more benefit because they can use and represent the data to fit their narrative because there is no other narrative because nobody wants to touch the data.

It's a self-feeding loop.

I'm stealing the term "crybullies". It's beautiful.

There's a difference between showing data or its interpretation is possibly incorrect versus just saying we don't need to inspect the data because of who referred to it. Being skeptical is one thing I can agree with, but not wholesale dismissal of the data because one is skeptical of the source.

Besides, often times the source isn't really the source. For example, if a publicly devout racist quoted FBI crime statistics, does that mean we can ignore the data because we heard it from the racist and not the FBI?

You can turn raw statistics into all sorts of false, misleading, or incomplete conclusions.

A white supremacist doing a statistical analysis isn't going to reach all that hard for stats that might contradict or weaken the conclusion they're trying for. If they find one accidentally, there's a pretty decent chance they'll "forget" to mention it.

I'm no expert in the field, but I'd wonder about things like encounter rates for the different populations, varying access to social services, things like lead paint being more prevalent in inner city housing, etc.

Lets back up.

I claimed a white male might feel irrational fear of the disproportionately large number of black on white crimes, just as maaku claimed a black person might feel irrational fear of crimes that happened a few generations back.

I linked to a source showing that the number of black on white crimes is disproportionately large. Perhaps this white supremacist organization did make arithmetic errors when multiplying row 2 column 2 by row 2 column 5. Did they?

It's a bit surprising that with all this criticism, no one is actually claiming the number is wrong.

>It's a bit surprising

...(eyes roll). Anyway, on a completely different taboo topic, I wonder if you've read the Unabomber's manifesto...

https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-The...

White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking.

And the lynchings maaku described are less common today than drowning in a swimming pool. What's your point?

Note that I linked to it for the content of the first data table. My link is not an endorsement of every single viewpoint that someone at that URL might hold - I actually just spent 2 minutes googling for a fact I had seen before and pasted the first link that had the data table.

>White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking.

If there are twice as many whites as blacks or 10 times as many whites as blacks would vastly change how your figure could be interpreted.

That isn't how they are being compared though - nor is it relevant.

You want to compare black on white crimes to white on black crimes. Not white on white crimes.

Across all races - they primarily commit crime against their own race. But some races receive more crime than they give.

Adjusted for population (there are far more white people than black people) there should be about equal white on black crime as black on white crime per capita. That isn't the case and is precisely what the data reads.

What is important isn't to jump to conclusions but rather investigate why. Which nobody wants to do unless they get labeled as a racist.

The source of information matters. This is doubly true for statistical claims since:

* statistics are often counter-intuitive,

* they are easy to manipulate or misinterpret,

* manipulation requires significant effort to discover,

* they are sometimes correct in form but the data is biased,

* bias in the data might have been mentioned by the initial data collectors but the analyzers may omit it (either intentionally or accidentally).

Clearly multiplying "number of white victims" by "percentage of white victims with offenders who are black" is easy to manipulate and misinterpret, as well as counterintuitive.

And detecting an arithmetic error would require significant effort. I'd have to open up ipython, copy&pasting the numbers, remove the commas and other formatting, and then press enter.

Um, ok.

But the original source of the information is the DOJ.

Government statistics may not always be perfect, but are you implying that the government is guilty of purposefully manipulating data? Why?

The problem is that they are highlighting a far less significant phenomenon (cross racial violent crime) to further their white supremacist agenda.

The vast majority of homicides (which the DOJ data excludes) committed against whites are committed by whites, and the vast majority against blacks are committed by blacks. The number of cross-racial homicides are an order of magnitude less in either direction. Don't take my word for it, look at the diagonal at the top left of this table:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

According the DOJ data you posted, 44% of the victims of white offenders are not white. Should they all be terrified of white people? Probably not.

So the situation in the data is more complicated than the white supremacists would care to admit.

But more importantly, people's perception of safety is not a direct reflection of the data, but instead, a reflection of the way the data is presented, either by the mass media, or by choose-your-own-agenda websites like the kind you linked.

It also tends to be heavily skewed for the local crime situation in which they live, rather than national crime stats.

Should they all be terrified...

Where did I advocate that anyone should be terrified? This is what I said about such fears: "his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem."

You just cited a blog which has this on their About Us page: "If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people."

Instead of allowing your father to fear for his and your safety based on his irrational and bigoted views, perhaps you could educate him not to accept data from fringe sources. Your reproduction of these titilating facts, completely removed from context, taken from a blog which has a White Power political agenda, is a curious tactic. Do you use this "evidence" to lend credence to your father's views? Do you think this justifies his ignorance? If you truly recognize his views as irrational, then you should not be dredging up wingnut blogs which are merely trying to incite hatred and divisiveness.

Please, educate your father so that his ignorance and bigotry do not permeate through to the next generation.

See my reply to EthanHeilman. Specifically, are you claiming the DOJ stats cited by this source are false, or that they made an arithmetic error when multiplying (# victims by race x) x (% of offenders of race Y)?

As for my father's feelings, it's really not cool to suggest he's bigoted. He's not - he's the epitome of a NY liberal and far more left wing than I am. E.g., he mostly accepts the tribalist fascism of the modern left, in comparison to my individualism. He's just unable to rationally assess the risk of low probability events that get lots of media coverage.

(He's hardly the only one. See, for example, this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 )

This is a logical fallacy that is unfortunately rampant on here. It's an ad hominem - the source may be a bunch of shitty people, but if we're arguing that we shouldn't accept something, attack the actual content of the message.

It's generally quite easy to do so when the source of information is biased, so dismantle the message if you want to argue about how it's incorrect.

It looks like these numbers posted were very low effort and lacking any real context whatsoever, so it shouldn't be too hard to rebut them.

Edit: In fact, unprepare does so quite well in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743

It's not entirely an ad hominem. The original claim contains an implicit appeal to authority in citing the link to the blog. Saying that the authority cited is not actually a valid authority (due to a known bias) is not quite the same as ad hominem.

We resort to reputation to calibrate the burden of proof. If the source cited is not a valid authority, that doesn't make them wrong, but it does make it harder for them to establish a claim that merits rebuttal.

I'm not appealing to authority at all. The article reproduces verbatim a table from the DOJ, then does multiplication.

I reproduced the multiplication myself, since so many people seem to think the white supremacists can't multiply.

But the multiplication does not support the assertion. I am sure that many people biased by skin color can perform multiplication with the help of a calculator. The accuracy of the calculation is not at issue.

The issue is that the multiplication is not valid according to Bayesian probability analysis. It doesn't matter how valid the original numbers are if you interpret them incorrectly. The implicit appeal to authority is that a group known for social policy commentary is somehow expected to have greater credibility in the area of statistical analysis.

In reality, they are just as bad at it as everyone else.

So in exposing the appeal to authority, we see more clearly that the burden is on them to show that their analysis is mathematically correct. So tell me. Why does the multiplication support their claims?

Scroll up. I'm not claiming white people should be afraid of blacks. I'm claiming that they have a vague proximal reason to be afraid, analogous to maaku's "possibility of being assaulted without recourse or lynched...a few generations back".

My opinion on all of these vague feelings of fear: "completely irrational and entirely his [the person feeling it] problem."

The problem is that liberals, who are well aware of crime figures, don't publicize them because to do so would be "racist". That is, they don't think that publishing these figures would serve any purpose other than perpetuating so called racism. So only the (far) right talk about them. Note that you haven't actually shown the figures are wrong.

>Please, educate your father so that his ignorance and bigotry do not permeate through to the next generation.

Do you refer to the fear of men as being rapists as bigotry?

And what about issues of the credible source not actually being such, such as the CDC not being a credible source once you realize how they twist their numbers (picking definitions of rape which exclude most female on male instances)?

From your link:

>These data cover all violent crimes except murder, but the number of murders is tiny compared to other violent crimes.

So, we've started by cherry picking our data, a really strong start.

Next we go on by comparing apples and oranges. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people, but the data you linked shows otherwise.

While 13.7% of violent crimes against white people were committed by black people, 56% of violent crimes against white people were committed by other white people.

You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by a white person than a black person, if you are a white person. So if you are afraid of being attacked by a black person, you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a white person (that is, if you are being logically consistent, rather than using confirmation bias to support a worldview of racial superiority, though your link suggests otherwise)

In this light, it is completely irrational to have anywhere near the fear of black people (or any other race) than you do for white people.

Further, if you are of a race other than black or hispanic, you are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked by a white person (40.3%) than a black person (19.3%).

The only thing damning against black people these statistics show, is that black people are vastly more likely to be violently attacked by other black people than by any other race. This is the same case for all the other races included. People of any given race are much more likely to have a crime committed against them by someone of their own race, than by someone of any other race.

The data source is the NCVS, a crime victimization survey. The reason is that we aren't relying on racist cops to tell us who the perpetrator is, we are just asking the victims. The survey methodology also allows us to detect unreported crimes.

One unfortunate drawback of the survey methodology is that you can't track murder.

You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people...

I've reached the conclusion that you didn't read my post. Try again. If you get confused, look for words like "completely irrational and entirely his problem".

>I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way?

Oh, so you think being 4 times more likely to be killed by another white person, means that you have a similar cultural experience to the subjugated minorities who are complaining across university campuses.

And because you have a white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else, you have decided to write off all the actual concerns of real people by saying they are just complaining too much?

Its really a fascinating argument. Good luck convincing anyone else who does not already agree with it.

...similar cultural experience...

No one besides you is discussing a cultural experience. The rest of us are discussing irrational reasons for fearing for one's physical safety.

...white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else...

The blog doesn't claim this, nor does the DOJ data table which it reproduces.

Its really a fascinating argument.

You have indeed invented an interesting argument.

>No one besides you is discussing a cultural experience.

Oh sorry, is that a trigger word for you? Let me instead say you are mistakenly claiming that the dangers faced by straight while christian males is of equivalent or greater danger than those faced by minorities.

>The blog doesn't claim this, nor does the DOJ data table which it reproduces.

No, but you are using that blog entry as evidence to support that claim.

Heres how the conversation went:

maaku said:

> The concern is not feelings getting hurt, but rather physical security as a person of minority status.

>This is something that a white heterosexual middle-class male (such as myself) can probably never fully appreciate, but I try to sympathize.

To which you responded:

>Actually white heterosexual middle class males can totally appreciate these things.

Using the source you linked as your evidence for that fact that straight white males have the same concern for physical security as minorities. You further explained that whites, asians, and christians are in a position to be equally fearful for their safety as blacks, women, and other minorities.

Using this evidence, you closed your argument by saying:

>I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way?

A dismissal of the complaints of minorities which you have written off by attempting to make an argument that straight white males have it just as bad as minorities, and thus if straight white males arent complaining, minorities have nothing more to complain about and should therefore shut up.

If you have a different argument to make, i would love to hear it.

EDIT: I see you instead decided to downvote each of these comments, so i'll just assume you indeed did not have a different argument to make. Thanks for the discussion anyways, have a good one!

"People of any given race are much more likely to have a crime committed against them by someone of their own race, than by someone of any other race."

Is there a correction factor for housing and employment segregation? The analysis seems to rely on a large municipal area with overlapping cultures rather than the usual situation on the ground which is highly segregated for a variety of socioeconomic reasons.

So given that, it is extremely likely that, say, home domestic disturbances or workplace violence will be extremely highly correlated with victim and attacker having same race.

However whats behaviorally relevant is the totally different statistics of "I'm a X and I see a Y walking down a dark street toward me, how should I react based on X and Y crime statistics?"

"you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a"

That whole clause is a statistical error as the odds of becoming a victim of a X have a lot more to do with the odds of a given X being a criminal, than they do with relative ratios of X on Y violence vs Y on X violence. Outside of really weird situations like active race riots or race based protests or similar lawlessness.

There is the meta question of "how do I need to signal to others in public to remain politically correct" vs "how do I actually need to act to survive" and discouragingly that gulf has been widening over past years mostly by changes in required political signalling behavior despite a remarkable drop in actual crime rates. Or at least reported crime rates.

And you're doubling down by comparing whole apples to orange sections.

If I'm going to use statistics to rationally calibrate my fear emotion, I should ensure that I am using the appropriate statistic.

I'd start off with the assumption that most violent crimes against me will be committed by another person that is both aware of my presence and able to make a credible threat of force against me. I'm probably not going to get punched in the face by anyone who cannot reach my face with their fists.

And I can further break that down by the fraction of time any given person presents me with the threat of violence. I may, perhaps, use risk of violence per minute of exposure as my metric.

It immediately becomes obvious that the publicly-available published crime statistics are useless for my purposes. They do not contain sufficient information to allow me to determine how much more or less likely I am to be attacked by a person of a given skin color for each minute of exposure to that person in public. I would have to know detailed social habits for everyone within the crime statistic reporting area.

It may be that for every 100000 opportunities to punch someone in the face, the conversion rate is higher for one skin color than for another, and I should therefore rationally calibrate my fear accordingly. But I really have no way of accurately determining that useful statistic from published crime data.

But even with that hanging over us, I still have to object to your misuse of statistics. You said:

  > You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by
  > a white person than a black person, if you are a white person.

And this does not follow from the previous paragraph. Given a randomly selected white person who was attacked in the last year, it is 4 times more likely that the attacker was white than black. Manipulating that conditional probability to find the ratio of probabilities that a randomly selected white person was attacked by a white person compared with a randomly selected white person being attacked by a black person requires additional Bayesian calculations that you did not perform. You would also need to know population sizes and overall violent crime rates.

But really, this is all moot, because fear is not rational.

I'm asian. I don't feel threatened by black crime when it's also shown that police target black people for arrest more than whites and that the system is often stacked against black people. I'm more uncomfortable that white males are shooting up schools in my country several times a year because there's nothing being done pointing this demographic out.

Your experience doesn't reflect the experience of all others.

What gives you the right to invalidate my father's feelings? You don't understand his lived experience (he was present at a major Islamic terrorist attack) at all!

I believe that's the standard social justice retort to your claims.

Being a more logically minded person, I'll instead invert it; your retort to my comment is that one person in the aforementioned demographic (e.g. a white/asian male) doesn't agree with me. If I could find one person in your aforementioned demographic (e.g. a black female) who didn't agree with you, would that be a valid retort against your comment?

I don't understand why you are dismissing claims as social justice and then trying to claim you are a more logically minded person.

How is the claim that not all asian people agree with your father or had traumatic experiences with terrorism also invalidating experiences your father had? You claim to be a logical minded person but I'm not following the logic that your father's experiences are invalidated when someone says they don't share that view.

That's why there is something called Statistics and they show that you are objectively wrong.

Now, about your feelings and uncomfortableness it's up to you.

> there is something called Statistics

And there's a reason there's a famous book titled "how to lie with statistics".

Statistically speaking, police stop and look for crime disproportionately to minorities. no? http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-targets-minorities-...

That's completely irrelevant. The data cited comes from the NCVS. It's based on a phone poll. "Have you been the victim of any crimes in the past year?" "Who committed the crime?"

The purpose of the NCVS is to track crimes and their characteristics without relying on (often biased, and frequently manipulated) police reports.

Living in Asia, I've seen a lot more news about "white males shooting up schools" than I have about other violent crime in the US, except perhaps police brutality. It's on major news pages / channels. Admittedly, most of what I find is through social media (US and Chinese).

Where do you get most your news?

Could be that one is more common than the other, therefore not as newsworthy. It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems most news is about sensationalism for purposes of generating revenue.

The news, even in America, vastly under reports minority murders, especially in high crime urban areas. 400+ people are murdered every year in Chicago, with black men being the victims at more than 10x the rate of white people in general, and more than double the rate of all other racial groups combined.

Most of this is gang related, and goes almost entirely unreported, even in Chicago itself. This trend is not unique to Chicago, either

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