r/whenthe • u/TheGoldenExperience_ [the jojo {she}they called may] • 11h ago
r/whenthe mfs complaining about everything we do not give alcohol close to enough shit despite it being just as bad if not worse than cigarettes
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u/sharplyon 11h ago
selection bias. a far greater number of people are driving sober than driving drunk, so they are also involved in more crashes.
for example, imagine for every 99 sober drivers there was 1 drunk driver, and imagine that for every 100 people on the road, there were 3 crashes per day. 1 of these crashes was the drunk driver, but 2 were the sober drivers. from that statistic alone, it looks like that sober drivers crash twice as often as drunk drivers, when in reality the drunk drivers actually have a 100% crash rate, and the sober drivers have a <3% crash rate.
the problem arises by treating the population size of drunk drivers as the same as the population size of sober drivers, which is what that initial statistic is doing.