[bryanrasmussen]

>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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[bryanrasmussen]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[bryanrasmussen]

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.