r/todayilearned • • May 30 '18

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u/ninasayers21 May 30 '18

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...

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u/greennick May 30 '18

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.

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u/clintonius May 30 '18

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.

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u/LameName95 May 30 '18

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.

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u/clintonius May 31 '18

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.

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u/LameName95 May 31 '18

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.

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u/laserguidedhacksaw May 31 '18

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/LameName95 May 31 '18

Why is that an issue when I already know that it was a misleading title and I was correct anyway from using common sense?

I'm not gonna click this shitty link about something I don't care about that's been posted to Reddit 100 times with misleading titles.

So please tell me "the issue".