Comment by atty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atty | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those articles where a data scientist hobbyist appears to completely ignore the experts of the field, make a few graphs, and think they’ve come to some new insight to an extremely complicated problem. There are people who spend their entire career studying this issue. I am sad to say I do this sometimes too - my girlfriend works in healthcare, and sometimes I’ll say things that are clearly wrong, but since I don’t work in the field, I miss a lot of institutional knowledge. And as a professional scientist, I see many, MANY people making similar errors when it comes to my field of expertise. I don’t want to stop people from being curious - on the contrary, being curious is great! But, recognizing that just being an educated individual does not mean we are qualified to talk about things that are not our area of expertise is also extremely important.

This ad hominem response doesn't refute a single data point or interpretation the author put forward. If the institutions that historically control the narrative are the only ones authorized to interpret the data then we may as well not have access to the data; we should close our eyes and allow them to lead us by the hand.

I think the issue is which “experts” are talking. The reality, is that there are no “firearm data science” experts, unless you decide to count the NRA or something.

My overall point here, is that even the narrative given “guns cause violence” is objectively not true. We can prove that. Similarly, we have substantial evidence to the contrary. In fact that the firearm homicide rate simply correlates with overall homicide rate.

That is much higher in certain population(s) of the U.S. which leads to a dramatic skewing of any analysis. WHICH btw I’d argue the experts are intentionally neglecting discussing.

Not sure what the purpose of this comment is.

We know from the reproducibility crisis that every field struggles with experts who are blind. It usually takes outsiders to shed light on this blindness.

That is succinctly why diversity is so important for problem solving.

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