Yep, I'm fairly sure I know who you are on Substack, and we already has this conversation about rates of sexual assault, right?

I use annual figures because there is no lifetime figure for murder. And I already explained on Substack why you can’t just multiply the annual figure by the number of years.

But just in case I'm totally wrong about who you are, let's do it again here.

Let's imagine that we find than in a given year, 2% of black people commit murder. And we want to know what percentage of black people commit murder over 50 years. If we multiply by 50, we find that 100% of black people commit murder over the course of their lifetime.

Do you see the problem?

You can't calculate lifetime rates by simply multiplying by the number of years because the category isn't static. And because of repeat offenders. And so, as any lifetime calculation will be a guess, and it’s often impossible to find lifetime rate calculations anyway, I calculate using annual rates to give a rough sense of what the rate is to the reader. Given that I state clearly that I'm calculating annual rates:

"And every year, a whopping 0.008% of the black population commits homicides that 100% of black Americans are demonized for."

I'm not seeing what the problem is.

I write these things, and all the criticism will land on me, I'm well motivated to scrutinise the calculations carefully. And I think carefully about why I'm presenting the data in the way I do. I don't rely on my readers agreeing with me.

And from my Substack, you'll know that very often my readers don't agree with me. In fact, very often, they're invested in finding the tiniest fault they can. But I don't think my reasoning is poor here. I think you're failing to appreciate the complexities of calculating lifetime figures.

As for the assertions, I didn't try to debunk any of them because, as you say here and as I say in the article, they're true. But without context, they sound far more damning than they are.

I'm not sure if anybody contests that only a tiny proportion of any racial group are murderers, but I'm wiling to bet that almost everybody reading the article, myself included before I did the calculation, imagined the proportion of black murderers is higher than it is (especially when quoting memes like 13/50). And when people talk about "black crime," they're not nuancing it by saying that it's "0.08% of black people crime." It's "the African American community" and "urban crime" and "black culture" that's behind it all. So I think a clear (as possible) portrayal of the actual scope of the problem is exceedingly important.

The notion of an innate propensity kind of falls by the wayside when you realise the percentage is this small, no?

I don't consider you an enemy. But I do think you’re a little arrogant. Which means you often fail to carefully consider rebuttals. Because as much as you profess to only be interested in logic and reason, there seems to be a strong resistance to admit when you’ve made an error, which means I end up repeating points I’ve already made.

So before you convince yourself I'm just bad at statistics (I'm not) or trying to slip my agenda past my sycophantic readers (I'm not), at least try to understand why I'm thinking the way I am. And why I disagree with your thoughts on lifetime calculations.

I get my fair share of criticism. My skin is more than thick enough to handle it. As evidenced by the fact that I read through this spectacularly condescending comment to see if I’d missed something. I'm very happy to correct errors when I make them. I've done so on several occasions. But I don't see how I'm wrong here (except maybe what you were saying about per capita rates on #1. I'll check that out when I get a chance).