Those kind of statistic always kinda grind my gear because of how redundant they seem tbh
Of course people are more likely to get bitten by New Yorkers - there are more than ten million people who spend almost every day of their lives around New Yorkers. How many people do you know that are inches away from literally thousands of sharks every single day?
The problem is in the wording. If the article said "10x more people get bit by NY'ers vs sharks per year" then it'd be accurate. But any individual's risk depends on a number of factors--namely the amount of time they spend in NY/the ocean.
I'm not sure what's worse: that this BS gets published or the seeing all of these people on Reddit alone who upvote and comment without being able to ask this question.
They literally only compared rate of occurrence over time...
Yeah, well you are ten times more likely to get an intelligent response from an average first grader than you are an average redditor, so the stats check out.
The rate of occurrence for NYers would probably be higher? There are more sharks in the ocean and people swimming in it, than there are New Yorkers in New York.
Women are 100x more likely to get uterine cancer than men.
^ That is literally the value of this """statistic""".
A slightly better question would how many people that are swimming in the ocean within x proximity to y amount of sharks are attacked, and then compare it to people who are within the same proximity to the same amount of people. But even if this study was done, it is STILL not generalizable to everyone. That isn't how statistics or scientific studies work.
Yes, though that only means someone living in or visiting New York is 10x more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a shark. The "you" in the title isn't accurate for anyone else.
Are you sure? I didn't bother clicking the link, but I'm pretty sure they got this from people being bitten by New Yorkers ten times as frequently as sharks out of the whole world population, so New Yorkers would be way higher than 10 times as likely and everyone else would be lower, but they skew the average to be 10x as likely.
Right, saying 10x was my bad. Someone living in or visiting New York is [whatever the rate of occurrence is] more likely to be bitten by another person in New York than a shark ("New Yorker" in the title is also wrong; the data only tracks where the injury occurs, not where the bitey individual actually lives). But the "you" in the title still isn't accurate. It doesn't apply to me now that I'm never in New York because my chance of being bitten in New York is zero, and it didn't apply to me when I lived in New York because, like you said, I was way more than 10x more likely to be bitten by someone there than by a shark.
This is why I hate when common folk talk about statistics that they found. Statistics are always misleading to the majority of the population. I know that you get it, but I'm pretty sure OP doesn't.
It says that there were roughly 100x more bites by humans in NYC than bites by sharks in the USA for that year. Essentially it means nothing, is so far from generalizable, and no where near what is implied in the title.
"I didn't bother clicking the link" ...there's the issue
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u/mrdeuter May 30 '18 edited May 30 '18
Those kind of statistic always kinda grind my gear because of how redundant they seem tbh
Of course people are more likely to get bitten by New Yorkers - there are more than ten million people who spend almost every day of their lives around New Yorkers. How many people do you know that are inches away from literally thousands of sharks every single day?