Chris
02-23-2018, 05:38 PM
This article was written by an illogical liberal (pleonasim :)).
This cartoon explains why predicting a mass shooting is impossible (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/22/17041080/predict-mass-shooting-warning-sign-research)
The sad truth is that the only personal factors that reliably correlate with mass shooters are being young and being male. There are a lot of angsty young men in this country. That makes prediction hard.
But what makes prediction even harder is just how rare these instances of mass shooting are. Yes, America has a gun violence problem. But the vast majority of people will never commit such a crime. Even if we said one in a million people will become mass murderers, that would be too high an estimate. There are 323 million people in the United States.
The fact that there are so few mass shooters and so many more harmless people makes it actually mathematically impossible to predict who might become a mass shooter.
OK, he illustrates this as follows...
Imagine a machine that could predict who will commit mass murder.
Assume it works absurdly well, 99 percent accurate.
Now analyze 100,000 people. You will get 1,000 false positives and possibly one potential mass murderer. Even if it guessed the potential mass murderer, he'd be hidden among the false positives.
Now run this machine on all US citizens and you would identify one or two potential mass shooters hidden among around 3.2 million false positives.
You just can't work with that.
The problem is we're working from hindsight and not prediction.
So how do I know it's written by a liberal? His last paragraph. After proving you can't identify potential mass murderers, he takes a flying illogical leap to:
Prediction won’t work, so what will? Well, there’s an answer, but it’s not going to make a lot of people happy. Considering the mathematical hurdles of predicting killers, maybe stricter gun control is actually the easier option to reduce gun violence.
A couple years ago I read a great psychology paper that reviewed all the possible signs of a potential mass murderer that concluded the same way, we just don't know, but gun control.
Liberals, being illigical, do not see their illogical leaps.
This cartoon explains why predicting a mass shooting is impossible (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/22/17041080/predict-mass-shooting-warning-sign-research)
The sad truth is that the only personal factors that reliably correlate with mass shooters are being young and being male. There are a lot of angsty young men in this country. That makes prediction hard.
But what makes prediction even harder is just how rare these instances of mass shooting are. Yes, America has a gun violence problem. But the vast majority of people will never commit such a crime. Even if we said one in a million people will become mass murderers, that would be too high an estimate. There are 323 million people in the United States.
The fact that there are so few mass shooters and so many more harmless people makes it actually mathematically impossible to predict who might become a mass shooter.
OK, he illustrates this as follows...
Imagine a machine that could predict who will commit mass murder.
Assume it works absurdly well, 99 percent accurate.
Now analyze 100,000 people. You will get 1,000 false positives and possibly one potential mass murderer. Even if it guessed the potential mass murderer, he'd be hidden among the false positives.
Now run this machine on all US citizens and you would identify one or two potential mass shooters hidden among around 3.2 million false positives.
You just can't work with that.
The problem is we're working from hindsight and not prediction.
So how do I know it's written by a liberal? His last paragraph. After proving you can't identify potential mass murderers, he takes a flying illogical leap to:
Prediction won’t work, so what will? Well, there’s an answer, but it’s not going to make a lot of people happy. Considering the mathematical hurdles of predicting killers, maybe stricter gun control is actually the easier option to reduce gun violence.
A couple years ago I read a great psychology paper that reviewed all the possible signs of a potential mass murderer that concluded the same way, we just don't know, but gun control.
Liberals, being illigical, do not see their illogical leaps.