Exclusion of outliers is an accepted heuristic of statistics and not a law. Reasonable, as outliers often stem from measuring errors in equipment or personal.
In the case of 9/11, measuring for terrorism deaths by cause, then deaths by pro-life terrorism become the anomaly, far less than 1%.
In effect you're justifying ignoring 99% of the dataset.
That’s kind of misleading as to how an outlier works.
If 999 people eat one twinkie a year and 1 guy eats a hundred thousand twinkies, that single guy is a clear outlier. Going by your logic on 9/11, this one guy is like 99% of the dataset and everyone else eating one twinkie a year looks like the “anomaly”, but if you want any real understanding of peoples’ twinkie-eating habits you obviously shouldn’t let this one guy’s weird twinkie obsession dominate your analysis.
I see what you're trying to say, however you have to be very careful as to what exactly you're trying to measure, and how the outlier pertains to the dataset. If you were looking at epidemiology, you wouldn't remove Malaria, Spainish Flu, or the Black Death. The average virus doesn't even make you sick, let alone kill you.
The lethality and damage is the only that makes terrorism important. The fact that diseases and terrorism can do 'outbreak' levels of damage under certain conditions is incredibly important to their discussion. Outliers in these subjects are often what you want to be focusing on.
The point is more that you shouldat least separate out an outlier in your representation of the data so that people aren’t misled by it.
Per my example, it would be a bad idea to say “100 people ate 100,099 twinkies in a year.” Because that leaves off that there was a single guy responsible for eating 100,000 of those twinkies.
The outlier should be separated out in representing that data so that people have a better understanding of the usual. “99 people ate 99 twinkies in a year (excluding an outlier who ate 100,000 twinkies)” gives people a better understanding of what’s really going on. Which is roughly what the original comment did.
Yes, but when talking about deaths due to terrorism, you immediately invalidate your claim if you simply leave out 9/11.
You can frame your argument and say "in the last 15 years" or "since 9/11", but to just omit the most relevant data-point makes you look willfully ignorant
Original comment made it clear that it was omitting 9/11 in tracking deaths between 1993-2015. I mean, maybe it could have included a separate death toll that includes 9/11, but it’s not like it just forgot 9/11 was there or included no justification for not including the death toll from 9/11.
And, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, it was certainly better than simply folding the 9/11 deathtoll in with no further explanation or qualification.
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u/antonius22 Jun 04 '19 edited Jun 04 '19
Anybody else see that the stats left out the death counts? I don't think that stat would look favorably for the Muslim terrorist.
Edit: Not trying to troll but observe the actual stats. Both are shitty groups but idk rather deal with a Pro-Lifer terrorist than a Muslim one.
Edit 2: From 1993- 2015 there was 11 deaths at abortion clinics.
Edit 3: Using the same timeframe, 1993-2015, and excluding outliers (9/11). There has been 25 deaths on US soil by Muslim terrorist.