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+++ statistical_inevitability [2025/11/07 00:26] (current) – ultracomfy
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-<fs xx-large>Statistical Inevitability</fs> describes 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:Statistical Inevitability~~
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+<fs xx-large>Statistical Inevitability</fs></WRAP>
+Statistical Inevitability describes 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:
   * Typewriting Monkey producing a copy of shakespeare: 1 in 4.4 × 10360,783
   * 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.)).
   * 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.
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 ====== Humans as a result of their environment ======
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+====== Theft ======
+//See the main article about [[Theft]].//
-====== Rates ======
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-The point is, 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//.
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-====== Theft ======
-//See the main article about [[Theft]].//
 Theft is a particularly interesting phenomenon to talk about in the context of statistical inevitability, because it is a nice visualization of how real world factors end up in the numbers we see in our spreadsheets. I talked in [[Theft]] about the three different factors that determine the morality behind actions, and they play out very nicely in this behavior. There are very few things that would incline a person to murder, AND it's seen as highly immoral by most people. In contrast, trying to designate grocery store theft as immoral [[Claim#Physical Restrictions|struggles with argumentative resistance]] at every step of the way, while being forced into a monetary system they did not sign up for and is mostly witnessed((Not seen! While people may consider money as a useful means of exchange and truly believe that it is necessary for a functional society, most people's experiences with money will revolve around the lack of it, and how that lack makes them miss out on stuff.)) as a restriction will incline them to take things despite not "legally being allowed to do so", creating intrisic motivation for theft. That intrinsic motivation for theft will usually be offset by the extrinsic discouragement provided in the form of store detectives, hefty fines, and a nation state worth of resources to hunt down dissenters - nothing a person that reasonably //can// pay will want to deal with, whilst still offering more than enough motivation for many((No citation needed.)) to try and do it anyway. They're not bad people, it's maths. And the same applies to murderers, just that the premises are different (obviously).
+====== Rates ======
+So, what's the point of all of this? Well, the point is that 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//.