cruel statistician doesn't care about tragedy
ICE agents killed a woman today, the video made a near-perfect scissor statement across the platforms. I am unmoved either way. A tragedy sure, but a very small tragedy compared to the world's problems. The stats aren't there to believe that this is the hill that we should care about.
Maybe it's an extreme data point that proves that police violence has had a significant uptick. I'd probably buy that argument for 9/11, but Rodney King, Trayvon, Ferguson, etc make me believe this is the same distribution we've had for a while.
Maybe it's a schelling point to talk about how the distribution of police violence has always been unreasonably high. I find it a shame that we don't have schelling points to talk about the preventable maladies of malaria and parasites in Africa.
The likely explanation for the platforms obsession over the tragedy would appear to be an ordinary case of angry germs and perhaps it's even as bad as a toxoplasma of rage. So it goes.
The sad part is my friends will be enraged with my stats perspective. They'll say: It's injustice! It's intolerable! You can't just stand by!
the perfect philosophy on what you should stand by
You should be obsessed over the details of your personal life. You should and must improve your relationships with your circle of friends and associates. You must read the room you're in and perform the game-theory correct move: sometimes cooperating, sometimes defecting, sometimes randomizing. You should harness your emotions to perform these actions. There's a compelling story that your feelings are finely tuned by evolution to give the correct precise responses to these interpersonal conflicts.
If you're feeling up to the task, you can also care about the wider world. But this caring about the wider world is a very different game than caring about your personal life. You must live by the misattributed Stalin quote:
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
A million people dying is far more important than just one dying, therefore you must care more about statistics than tragedies.
Unfortunately our emotions are not finely tuned to understand the statistical suffering of thousands, millions, or billions of beings.
Even if you can see the magnitude of the problem, your solutions are going to be terrible because you don't have any skin in the game 1. Imagine your friend is feeling depressed because they can't lose weight and you buy them chocolates to cheer them up. Immediately you'll face the consequences of appearing dimwitted and insensitive by giving the wrong type of help. But when you try to help the depressed national economy by voting for more tariffs and accusing the [insert hated group: billionaires, jews, immigrants, corporations] there's no personal consequence to you for offering the wrong type of help. The way to have skin in the game is to tie your reputation to statistical predictions 2. For example you could bet on the employment rates after new tariffs on a prediction market site like Kalshi.
To prioritize which world problems are the most important you'll need statistics. Even more importantly if you want solutions that actually solve the problem you'll definitely need measurements (i.e. statistics) to see if you're making progress.
I'm sorry that a tragedy happened, I really am. If I was an omniscient, omnipotent, God I really would try to be omnibenevolent. Unfortunately I am forced to triage. Your tragedy is currently only tragic, let me know when it builds itself up to be a statistic.
AUGGHHG forget everything I just wrote above. This all must be untrue to me in some way. Because the same arguments should apply to Luigi Mangione's killing of Bryan Thompson and for unknown reasons I am very ok being pissed about it. I posted about how evil it was on social media and I remain adamant in that position. Hmmm... well my pyschology is f*cked up, good to know I can't be trusted.
On closer inspection it looks like most of most of my disturbance with the Mangione killing is how others reacted to it. It's quite sad that a CEO died but critically it was the positive enthusiasm on social media for the act that upset me. Perhaps most of the strong feelings that people have around Renee Good shooting is how little their fellow Americans aren't standing up to evil.
Admittedly I'm so pro-insurance, pro-free market that Mangione's act was a great way to split me from a large portion of society. It was the fact that it represented anti-insurance, anti-market sentiments that really got my goat. Maybe this is why police killing of blacks are far more likely to spiral into social media hysteria. Liberal pro-black Americans can clearly see how large portions of America are not getting as equally upset over a (perceived) anti-black murder.
In a more cutesy form: "feelings without feedback are faulty". A quick proof, imagine if men were allowed themselves to believe their sexual fantasies were true. That is that they were God's gift to women and soon they'd have Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift lying on their couch. Constant rejection gives men the vital feedback to dispel their fantasies. A longer more thorough proof is found in Bryan Caplan's excellent book.↩
See Phillip Tetlocks excellent book and the even better sequel↩