The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday". The typical way of computing "dangerosity" is through a ratio. Eg: number of death / kilometer for transportation systems, number of injury / game for sports, ...
Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and dismissing the denominator ?
>The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday".
Why would that be the "real question"? Just because all we have is the hammer of statistical analysis?
More people are getting killed, whether they are environmental activists is not that relevant.
What's relevant is that there is increased willingness to kill in favor of anti-environmnet interests.
>Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and dismissing the denominator ?
It shouldn't be computed at all, the concern here is not to give people some dangerocity score to help them avoid being killed.
The concern is to stop the interests that kill -- that is, to stop the murders and the murderers, not to avoid them by having people not be environmental activists or be more careful about it.
(Same way we would want to reduce racist crime, not e.g. tell blacks to be more careful. We might also want that, but not as a first priority, as a treatment to the symptoms, not the cause).
Despite this weird sub-thread, the article isn’t talking about “dangerosity”. They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps, who are also murdering opposing activists.
The article isn't original reporting at all, it is basically a press release for a report generated by an NGO. It's fine to question the source material here.
What indication do we have that environmentalally unfriendly companies are murdering activists?
I cannot imagine that being their best PR strategy, not to mention the fact that murdering your opposition attracts a lot of scrutiny, investigation, and which corp exec would want to risk going to jail for ordering a hit on an activist. Far more practical to lobby or spread counter marketing spin.
>I cannot imagine that being their best PR strategy
The "backend" 80% of the world doesn't work with PR strategies.
Nobody cares if an activist is murdered in Nigeria or Mexico etc., same way few care about journalists in those area. There will be some reports (if that), most will never even reach your preferred news outlets, and that's it.
And in more subtle areas (outside the developing world) they can always make it look like a "mysterious" homicide case, despite e.g. known threats, beatings, etc, that had been reported prior to the murder.
There are interests of billions to be made, from mega-corps, local lackeys, corrupt politicians and cops on their pockets, and so on.
Same way nobody cares for 10-100 million dollar bribes all too common in big construction, supply, procurement, finance, and so on, tenders. One in 100 might get some scrutiny (usually after the party doing it is out of power with no way to be re-elected, so those affected don't have any clout anymore).
>not to mention the fact that murdering your opposition attracts a lot of scrutiny, investigation, and which corp exec would want to risk going to jail for ordering a hit on an activist.
Lol. No exec "orders a hit" (except if it's some local representative or director and knows the ropes in that area).
Foreign execs convey a message that "this thing is an inpediment", "something must be done" and so on, in the vaguest (but clear) possible ways, and people with a lot to gain locally, paid for those deals, know how to take care of things, with several layers of indirection.
Same way sweatshops and child labour (all the way to small kids working on cobalt mines) have "plausible deniability" from industry execs, and several layers of contractors between them.
Not everywhere is the First World. In many places of the world, you can buy protection from scrutiny and investigation of the local authorities, and remote authorities in London or New York won't likely give a damn about what happened somewhere in eastern Indonesia, for lack of jurisdiction.
Plus, given how dangerous some places are even for locals, you can always plausibly deny your involvement: oh, it was the bandits, they are awful to everyone.
Arguably, if journalists and activists get a credible understanding that investigating this activity is likely to just get you hurt or killed without achieving anything, that "a good deed won't go unpunished", then this reputation would decrease scrutiny and investigation.
> They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps
Is there an increase, though?
The BBC has sadly become known to be rather loose with facts. The answer to the upstream question here would let us know if there is an increase and what kind. Absolute? Relative? How big of a problem is this, really, or is it more of the BBC fomenting noise and anxiety for clicks.
We're trying to get information to understand the world better. People who run around insisting that x piece of information is irrelevant and how dare you ask either don't understand the question or have something to hide
You know what? Sure, let’s assume the BBC is “FUDing for clicks”. We’ll ignore the source report, and general common sense.
Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on? And that your statistical skills somehow matter to the real world activists dying?
> The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday".
Why would that be a real question? The activism itself should not be life threatening activity. If the amount of killed activists is proportionally the same every year ... then there is still have real issue.
So if bands of luddites stated murdering software developers, this would not be a problem if the overall growth of the industry was larger than the rate of murders?
Yes, seriously. Number one failure in sensationalized reporting is base rate fallacy: they point out a high absolute number, implying something strange is going on, whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
I don't mean this is the case here (I'm yet to read the article itself) - but this failure mode in reporting is so common that it's a good habit to immediately look for / question lack of base rate data.
I get that at some point murder becomes statistics, but I still feel the need to re-emphasize that this is murder. Not more folks getting the flu because there are more folks.
The larger point is that some (very small) percentage of people will be murdered every year. If the number of climate activists increases, the chance of one of them being murdered increases with it - possibly just by being involved in a random shooting or family drama, completely unrelated to their activism.
I agree that murder is horrible, but the article seems to try to sell that these murders are related to their activism, which is not something you can say just based on the absolute number. You need to have the ratio to compare to the last year and to the base rate in the general population to make a better statement. Without it, we can't be sure of the real cause and might try to fix this at the wrong place, leading to us to not prevent murders effectively - so yes, you need to get your statistics right, even when talking about horrible incidents.
i disagree with the implication that murder somehow shouldn't be looked at in statistical terms. I am not saying it should only be looked at in statistical terms, but it is one important way of looking at it.
>whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists, although it may be the case.
The point of having the denominator is so that you don't need to assume anything, you can just know which way the rate is going.
Perhaps you're right that in this case, the rate isn't going to stay constant. But in general, with news reporting, I found it safe to assume that if the rate was rising, they would've reported on the denominator too - the reason to omit it is usually because it would kill the story.
EDIT:
To expand on this further - and again, I'm defending the original question as a perfectly legit one, not trying to diminish the fact that we're talking about murders here - you always want to see the whole fraction spelled out, numerator and denominator, because the other common trick to deceive with numbers is by providing only the ratio itself. E.g. "over past year, incidents of $crime rose by 80%", or "$substance increases your cancer risk by 300%", where the unmentioned denominator is "3" and "0.00001", respectively.
The way I see it: even if we're talking about clear tragedies or acts of evil, it's always better to have an accurate picture of what is being talked about.
> there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists
If activists are being murdered for activism, the rate among activists will go up. If a greater share of the population is becoming activist, and are being randomly murdered for non-activist reasons, that’s a different story.
if the number of police rise does the ratio of police being killed on the job stay the same?
what if 5% of the workers at big corporations are willing to kill activists for activism, those 5% are busy killing activists, if the activists increase unless the corporations increase the number of people they have willing to kill activists it follows that there are not going to be a significant increase in the number of murdered activists.
In short there can be all sorts of reasons why the percentage of activists killed for activism would not remain constant.
All you wrote is exactly why you want to know the base rate (or several, against different possible hypothesis). Otherwise, it's not possible to even speculate about these things productively.
as you'll notice in my first reply to you I never said I did not want to know the base rate - what I said was - first quoting you
>whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
then in my reply to you
>there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists, although it may be the case.
again, nothing about not needing to know the base rate, just noting that there might reasons for the rate of murders to not rise proportionally.
After writing something so straightforward that it might as well be observing that water is wet I've gotten a number of responses from people whom, just as straightforward, seem to want to inform me that the sun is out today and are intent on hammering it into my thick skull despite my never having said otherwise.
This assumes that there is an infinite capability and willingness to kill activists.
If you have 100 ppl demonstrating against a hydro dam and 1 gets murdered later that night it does not follow that there likely would have been 2 killed if 200 ppl demonstrated.
These are murders of people. The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article. To say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders, just because you were personally interested in a number you couldn't find in the article, is crass.
No. These are murders of "people who do XYZ". If we looked at murders of people who play Fortnite from 5 years ago until now, we'd see a clear trend, for no reason other than the fact that the number of people who play Fortnite has ebbed and flowed.
I don't know anything about this particular situation, but your callous dismissal of this indisputably correct warning is wrong.
I didn't say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders. I said, in my paragraph, that sensationalized articles in general (and note that I didn't say this one definitely is in this category) often don't report the base rate, because it would reveal they're reporting a non-story. And I said that to counter cenophor's objection to ArchieMaclean's question, by pointing out it's pretty much the first question one should be asking when discussing an article/report that doesn't provide that number.
> The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article.
It wasn't, at least not directly. The numbers I saw are:
- 227 activists killed in 2020, the titular record number
- 4 activits / week on average being killed since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015[0]
You can tease out some insight from deconstructing the average (e.g. the 2020 number is above the average), but not much really. Not enough to tell you whether something has changed about this situation.
Also, please don't assume people asking for more clarity and better data are ignoring the human life context of the story.
--
There seems to be an error in the reported context of that figure - Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, but signed in April 2016 and became effective from November 2016 - per - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement.
Of course we should be doing all we can to prevent murder! It is just always hard to tell with statistics and having a more honest statistic (that, say, shows that murder rates have doubled while number of activists have increased 30%) would be preferable.
The increasing number of activists murders to me only indicates that the killers and especially whoever is behind them isn't being caught and is still free to eliminate again and again people they find inconvenient for their businesses. If each one of them was arrested and given a life sentence after each murder, whether committed or by contract, we probably would have solved the problem ages ago.
Those people have shitloads of money at disposal for hiring gunmen, so I expect they can buy other people among the local law enforcement too.
I’m not sure what kind of number you’re looking for. There’s no global registry tracking the population of environmental activists - just that when people are murdered by anti-green corporations, we can figure out that the person’s activism is what caused it.
Quoting from the methodology section of the report:
> To meet our criteria, a case must be supported by the following available information:
> Credible, published and current online sources of information.
> Details about the type of act and method of violence, including the date and location.
> Name and biographical information about the victim.
> Clear, proximate and documented connections to an environmental or land issue.
When people are murdered, we can't be sure who did it unless there's evidence. The methodology doesn't seem to include gathering evidence of who the murderer was, only that the murder happened to an activist. Saying "when people are murdered by anti-green corporations" is begging the question, because the report doesn't pass on any evidence that they were murdered by anyone in particular.
> Who else do you think is going around conveniently getting rid of activists that oppose profit and greed?
You're missing the point. People are murdered all the time for all sorts of reasons, including people who happen to be activists. The question is: are activists being murdered for their activism or for some other reason? Until you can demonstrate that, you simply don't have grounds to suspect megacorps or their agents are doing the murdering.
For example, the number of people who listen to Ed Sheeran music has risen enormously in the last decade. So has the number of Ed Sheeran listeners who were murdered. It doesn't follow that they were murdered because they have dubious taste in music—just that as the population of Sheeran fans grows so does the number of people in it being murdered. That might happen even if the overall murder rate was going down.
It's important to see the direction we're going in. If the number of activists increased by an order of magnitude (for example), we would be on a great trajectory to reduce these murders. If the number of activists stayed the same, this would be a horrible development.
Of course corporate murder is horrible, but the world is on fire (quite literally). Without putting the numbers in perspective, there's no way to tell whether we need to put our resources towards fighting activist murders or, for example, clan criminality.
The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday". The typical way of computing "dangerosity" is through a ratio. Eg: number of death / kilometer for transportation systems, number of injury / game for sports, ...
Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and dismissing the denominator ?