

Mark Twain on Risk Analysis - yan
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/mark_twain_on_r.html

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liquidben
This sort of thread would be remiss to not include the quote popularized by
Twain about there being three types of falsehoods: "Lies, damn lies, and
statistics"

Amusingly enough, it's got its own Wikipedia page
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statisti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics)

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jcl
Of course, in this case Twain is guilty of statistics. The group of people
most likely to die (old, infirm, sick) are more likely to be in a bed than on
a train. And the people in New York beds spend a significant fraction of the
year there, while the people on the train are only there for only a few hours
or days. If Twain made an honest comparison of deaths per hour across similar
demographic groups, the bed would look a lot better than the train.

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cryptnoob
Yes Buzz Killington, you're right. Silly of him to make such an obvious error,
wasn't it. So silly, it makes me smile to think of his ignorance.

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prat
classic twain.. way ahead of his time..Its a pity we still interpret the
statistical significance of events by their interestingness and not by the
frequency and end result. Shark attacks get way more coverage in media than
Deer accidents even though a deer is 300 times more likely to kill you than a
shark ([http://www.dalecarnegiecoaching.com/2009/06/which-do-you-
fea...](http://www.dalecarnegiecoaching.com/2009/06/which-do-you-fear-more-
sharks-or-deer.html)).

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boredguy8
The location of one's death and the cause of one's death are not the same
thing. It sure sounds nice...and there probably should be some limit on
whether or not we 'care' about 'one-off' causes of death in the same way any
sufficiently complex system is going to have undesirable outcomes. But that
doesn't mean we should stop trying to avoid them: if I could save 26 lives by
some simple means, I'd gladly do it.

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dhyasama
Twain tweaks his wording to make a point. Of course you are more likely to die
in bed then on a train, but dying on the train isn't the issue. Dying under
the train is.

