Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
Volume matters in both shootings and CO2
Continue driving though.
|
Well no. It depends on what you're trying to do with the stats. Something like per-capita mass shooting deaths has little power as a predictive tool because of the small sample size. Nobody would reasonably expect that over the next five years, you have greater odds of being killed in a mass shooting in Norway than in the US.
On the other hand, CO2 emissions on per-capita cannot be dismissed on the same grounds, because they actually have excellent predictive abilities.
But even with per-capita mass shooting deaths, it still has effectiveness in other applications; like if you were having a discussion about how countries have been impacted by mass-shootings, then the small sample size is irrelevant; Norway has been massively impacted, more than any other country. That would be a totally valid use of the statistic. Just don't use it for projections.