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Almost every person is hopeless at calculating probabilities. If they weren’t, casinos and poker machine operators would be out of business tomorrow. In fact, casinos are so reliant on their customers being so crap at calculating probabilities that they actively ban anyone they suspect of being any good at it (“card counting”).
This isn’t to say that people are stupid. It’s just that dispassionately weighing probabilities goes completely against human nature. Our evolutionary history has made us hard-wired to make irrational, subjective assumptions about events. Like the scientific method, probabilistic deduction is something that has to be learned by hard mental sweat.
Most of us just don’t bother.
My first degree was in mathematics and my favourite class was probability. It was so counter-intuitive. I still recall the time the professor walked in and asked us ‘how many people do you need in a room to have a 50-50 chance of two of them sharing the same birthday (not the same year, but the day of the year)?’[…] It’s ‘23’. Put 40 in a room and you get up near a 90 per cent chance of two or more shared birthdays. At 75 people it’s very close to 100 per cent.
But that intuitively strikes almost all of us as wrong.
This proclivity for intuitively jumping to false conclusions is much of the reason why the Black Lives Matter narrative has so gripped so many peoples’ minds.
Start with the Minneapolis death of George Floyd […] in light of all the days of rioting across the US if you ask people to put this in context I bet almost all of them would get it wrong. It instinctively feels as though lots of white cops are killing lots of black men in the US. But that’s not true. The Washington Post (a lefty, liberal rag if ever there were one) has a database that lists the stats for 2018. Seventeen unarmed blacks were killed by police that year […] that adds up to about 0.2 per cent of black homicide victims for 2018. By contrast, 90 per cent of those deaths were killings of blacks by other (non-police) blacks.
And likewise if you asked people what percentage of all police killings were of blacks, and they had only the mainstream media’s reporting to go by, they’d get this one wrong too. You see just under three-quarters of police killings in the US each year are not of blacks. But when do you hear a report of the police killing a white guy or Asian? Not often. Okay, maybe if the victim were gay or Muslim or Democrat or fitted into some other category the press likes to paint as victims.
Of course, none of this says anything about any particular case. This is the flipside of the near-universal failure to understand basic probability. When the left lost their minds over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve and the genuine racists on the right took it as vindication, neither of them understood the first thing about what the book actually said, nor the nature of its probabilistic arguments.
In the case of George Floyd, the overwhelming statistics showing that police are not wilfully killing black Americans does not say that George Floyd wasn’t killed by police. But neither does George Floyd’s killing taken on its own prove anything about the nature of policing in America.
Assuming otherwise is such a common failure of reasoning that there’s even a name for it: the Anecdotal Fallacy. Which is the error of allowing the emotional effects of a vivid memory or story to outweigh stronger evidence, such as statistics.
But that doesn’t change how warped most people’s views of the relative likelihoods of police killings of blacks are. Indeed this is why the LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick ‘taking a knee’, sports stars against supposed police brutality campaign is basically stupid. They are generalising from a handful of reported cases. They don’t know the facts. Worse, they’re missing the real problem with US criminal justice while they bask in the warm glow of their own virtue-signalling.
People who fall for or peddle anecdotal fallacies are not just wrong or misguided: they’re dangerous. Several people have been killed, hundreds injured, and tens of millions of dollars of damage and destruction wreaked on cities and businesses – many of them black-owned – by people whose fundamental inability to grasp statistics has provoked them to deadly outrage.
All over a conspiracy theory which is easily debunked by a modicum of mathematical knowledge and reasoned consideration.
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