You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ChristianKl comments on The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: Stefan_Schubert 11 November 2014 08:25PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (40)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 November 2014 10:41:01AM 0 points [-]

"Actual rates" is not something that we now and can list in a statistic. We can only use different methods to get a proxy of that value.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 12 November 2014 10:48:43AM 0 points [-]

Yes yes. Any measurement has an error. I shouldn't have written "actual". But what are you driving at? Do or don't you agree?

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 November 2014 11:05:06AM 1 point [-]

You have written actual because you think "actual". It's not.

If you take your first link and actually read the paper you will find: "The unlawful (criminal) acts dealt with by the police, including attempts subject to punishment, are recorded in the Police Crime Statistics. This also includes the drug offences handled by the customs authorities. "

Police Crime Statistics is the name of the report. It doesn't include crimes not dealt with by the police because nobody reported the crime and the police has no other way of knowing about it.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 12 November 2014 12:59:35PM 0 points [-]

It's not like wo don't know anythink about the dark figures. The first rigorus approch seems to be this one:

Dunkelfeldforschung in Bochum 1986/87 by Hans-Dieter Schwind

This is in German but an executive summary in English can be found on page 290 ff.

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 November 2014 03:21:12PM 0 points [-]

We know enough to know that statistics like the one you cited shouldn't be treated as being the actual values and that was the main point I was making above.