Hacker News Reader

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!

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.

"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.