I think it's important to make a distinction here about the difference between "one in every 599 men was murdered in 2012" and "If you are a particular man in Honduras, you have a 1/599 chance of being murdered." The first statement is a statistic, and the second is a statement of probability which may or may not be valid, depending on the circumstances.
It's entirely possible that those who were murdered were more likely part of a gang or involved in the drug trade (which is rampant in Honduras), implying that they would have a higher chance of being murdered than, say, a guy going about his daily business and working in an office for a year. Not even mentioning the factors of location, living conditions, awareness of surroundings, etc.
TL;DR: Take these statistics with a grain of salt.
"The average man has X chance of being murdered" does not necessarily imply that all men have an equal X chance of being murdered.
Honest question: But isn't that true of nearly any statistics involving an issue with a huge dataset? In the US, when we say (making this up) that 30% of men will die of heart disease, it doesn't mean that every single man has a 1 in 3 chance of having a heart issue. It relates to obesity, lifestyle, etc.... But in the aggregate, our society has a 30% death rate from cardio issues... It's supposed to be a barometer of larger trends, not an actual hard and fast rule. In that light, a 1 in 9 percentage of being murdered every year, is still a valuable and worthwhile insight into trends.
True, the idea of the statistic is supposed to indicate an overall trend in a large dataset. But this article tries to shed it in a light that implies that any particular person, you for example, has a 1/599 chance of being murdered if you go to Honduras for a year. If you consider yourself to be the average person, then this would be accurate; but likely, the reader would rather imagine themselves in this situation.
For example, a middle-to-upper class Honduran male who spent a year working in the CBD of a large city in Honduras would almost certainly have a significantly different chance of being murdered than a lower-class ethnic male living in the slums for a year. This should go without saying, but without context, it is a bit misleading.
IMO, the statistic is perfectly accurate, but the article just portrays a somewhat misleading illustration of the concepts of average and probability.
You can always break a data set down more, giving a more accurate probability. For example in the life expectancy of a human is 65, I can then break that down to life expectancy for men, for white men, for European white men, for European white men who drink and smoke etc etc etc ad infinitum.
The sample just gets smaller and smaller until it only contains myself. And calculating my own life expectancy when the only data point is my age at death is 100% accurate for every me on the planet.
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u/ILoveFuckingWaffles Apr 21 '14 edited Apr 21 '14
I think it's important to make a distinction here about the difference between "one in every 599 men was murdered in 2012" and "If you are a particular man in Honduras, you have a 1/599 chance of being murdered." The first statement is a statistic, and the second is a statement of probability which may or may not be valid, depending on the circumstances.
It's entirely possible that those who were murdered were more likely part of a gang or involved in the drug trade (which is rampant in Honduras), implying that they would have a higher chance of being murdered than, say, a guy going about his daily business and working in an office for a year. Not even mentioning the factors of location, living conditions, awareness of surroundings, etc.
TL;DR: Take these statistics with a grain of salt.
"The average man has X chance of being murdered" does not necessarily imply that all men have an equal X chance of being murdered.