Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

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I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy!

I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?

There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!

You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!

I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.

It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.

I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.

Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

> It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe.

What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).

I suppose it is on one hand based on media, NYC is the big bad city, it's the mafia city, if you have a crime based movie it will be in NY, LA, or maybe Chicago as the most popular places.

Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.

I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.

It's kind of a running joke here in NYC how we'll watch some movie depicting the city as a dystopian wasteland, then we walk outside into tree-lined streets, coffee shops, overflowing sidewalk cafes, and people generally living and enjoying their lives.

That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.

This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.

I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.

> That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.

I agree, but I'm not that old and that's the image of New York City I grew up with because it was then true.

It takes more than a generation to overcome that kind of impression. I'm pretty confident that if you asked New Yorkers my parents' age what the South is like you'd get a lot of answers that were unpleasantly accurate in 1965. This is particularly true when a lot of political polarization is based on region and urbanization.

Yes, people don't understand the real danger in cities like NYC - gentrification! :)

Most crime is marginal even inside cities "infested" with crime. If you are personally affected (statistically improbable), the city/place is already unlivable and it'll go down quickly like some places in South America.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.

> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

> There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.

The problem with numbers as they are only as good as the source numbers and questions you ask..

If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).

Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.

One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.

One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.

The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.

The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.

The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.

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