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--- statistical_certainty [2024/01/04 20:06] – created ultracomfy
+++ statistical_certainty [2025/04/09 20:32] (current) – ultracomfy
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-<fs xx-large>Statistical Certainty</fs> is a concept I made up describing the reality that things, good or bad, //will// happen. Theft, murder, fraud and other malicious activity aren't as much a tragedy as they are a statistical inevitability. Humans are complex beings and asking "why are there bad people out there that would do these things"(("these things" here means //any bad thing// that one could complain about.)) is not a particularly useful starting point to discuss such events. The amount of certainty depends on the topic in question, but, given a large enough population, most things are statistically certain:
+~~Title:Startistical Certainty~~
-  * Typewriting Monkey producing a copy of shakespeare: 1 in 4.4 × 10360,783
+~~REDIRECT>Statistical_inevitability~~
-  * Murderers: 0,006% of people are murderers((Or, have "intentionally committed homicide" - [[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5|World Bank Data on Intentional Homicides]], figure for the entire world for 2020.)).
+~~HIDEPAGE:sitemap~~
-  * A person doing a thing they were not meant to do and for which a clearly visible and accessible notice has been posted beforehand: See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness|Banner Blindness on Wikipedia]] or other relevant issues like this
-====== Rates ======
-The talk about individuals is relevant only insofar as that their motives and the factors acting for and against them or their motives need to be analyzed. Shoplifting is a mass phenomenon and efforts against it need to consider 1) why people shoplift and 2) what makes them stop doing it. The factors causing people to "do bad things" affect everyone. If we say that behavior is a product of circumstances then all it takes is for the circumstances to align just right to cause whatever kind of behavior you want to analyze. The circumstances do not align for most people to cause them to commit murder, but just adding more people into the population is enough for circumstances to align, randomly or not, until one of them //will// eventually happen to align. To compare regions or demographics or other subsets of a population, you will therefore almost always be talking about "rates", not absolutes. "10 murders" can be much or little depending on whether we are looking at a population of 11 people (now 1), or a population of 3 million. Most population-based rates these days are expressed as //X in 100000 people//.