Wednesday, 1 February 2017

The Odds of Being Killed by an Immigrant

Scott Adams' Blog



I keep seeing tweets and articles saying the odds of an immigrant killing a citizen of the United States are approximately zero. Obviously those calculations assume that our past experiences do a good job of predicting what happens next. And this is good news. Really, really, good news.
It’s good news because I used to be afraid of lots of stuff that never happened in the past. For example, I have never died from a nuclear attack, but now I understand that risk to be zero. We can dismantle our nuclear deterrents and relax. If a nuclear bomb hasn’t killed me in the past, I can safely conclude that it will never kill me in the future. I feel sorry for all of you science-deniers who think otherwise.
I built a complicated prediction model to prove my point. The model only has one variable – the number of times I have died in nuclear blasts in the past. That number equals the number of times I will die in nuclear blasts in the future. Skeptics might doubt the credibility of my prediction model, but I would argue that it fits the past quite well. And that means it predicts the future too, unless you are ignorant of science and whatnot. 

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