According to Google Answers<\/a>, the US Census Department reports that there are 2363 four year colleges in the US. So, assuming the widest possible distribution of student deaths, there were 1506 colleges with no student deaths in a five-year period. Or, put another way, more than 60% of colleges in the US went that five-year period without any violent student deaths.<\/p>\n Or, let’s try looking at it another way. According to the census, there are 15.9 million<\/em> people currently enrolled in college. The school that, according to the author, is so<\/em> remarkable for going without any murders in the last four years? It has 325 students<\/em>. Not 325 per class – 325 total<\/em>.<\/p>\n In other words, among a group making up less than 2\/1000ths of one percent of the college population, there were no murders. Assuming that the distribution of violent deaths is perfectly uniform (which it obviously isn’t; but let’s just keep things simple), given that there were 857 violent deaths in the student population as a whole, how many violent deaths would you expect<\/em> among the student body at his dinky christian college?<\/p>\n That would be a big, fat zero. <\/p>\n
The fact that there were no violent deaths at his school isn’t remarkable, not at all. But to a twit who’s incapable of actually understanding what numbers mean, that’s not the conclusion to be drawn. It’s also not that the violent death among college students is actually remarkably rare. Nor is it that most<\/em> college students will go through college without any violent deaths on campus. No – according to a twit, with 857<\/em> violent campus deaths over five years, the only<\/em> reasonable conclusion is that there must be something special about the ridiculous religious rules at his college that prevented the great rampaging plague of violence from touching the students at his school.<\/p>\n I actually spent five years as an undergraduate at Rutgers University in NJ. During that time, there were no violent student deaths. (There was one death by alchohol poisoning; and there was one drunk driving accident that killed four students.) But zero<\/em> violent deaths. Gosh, Rutgers must have been an absolutely amazingly moral university! And gosh, we had all of those horrible sinful things, like dancing<\/em>, and co-ed dorms<\/em>! How did we manage to go all that time with no violence?<\/p>\n It must have been the prayers of the very nice Rabbi at the Chabad house on campus. Yeah, that must be it! Couldn’t just be random chance, right?<\/p>\n
Ok, now let me stop being quite so pettily snide for a moment. <\/p>\n
What’s going on here is really simple. We hear<\/em> a whole lot about violence on campus. And when you hear about eight-hundred and some-odd violent deaths on campus, it sounds<\/em> like a lot. So, intuitively, it sure seems like there must be a whole lot of violence on campus, and it must be really common. So if you can go through your whole time in college without having any violence occur on campus, it seems<\/em> like it must be unusual.<\/p>\n That’s because, as usual, we really suck at understanding big numbers and scale. 800 sounds like a lot. The idea that there are nearly sixteen million<\/em> college students is just not<\/em> something that we understand on an intuitive level. The idea that nearly a thousand deaths could be a tiny drop in the bucket – that it really amounts to just one death per 100,000 students per year – it just doesn’t make sense<\/em> to us. A number like 800 is, just barely, intuitively meaningful to us. One million isn’t. Fifteen million isn’t. And a ratio with a number that we can’t really grasp intuitively on the bottom? That’s not going to be meaningful either.<\/p>\n Bozo-boy is making an extremely common mistake. He’s just simply failing to comprehend how numbers scale; he’s not understanding what big numbers really mean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to another one, which I can’t resist mocking. As I’ve written about quite often, we humans really stink at understanding big numbers, and how things scale. This is an example of that. We’ve got a jerk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-probability","category-big-numbers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-dQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2923,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions\/2923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}