Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Of course you don't, because the data don't support your assumptions. If you can so easily discount figures based on your hunches, why should we take any figures you provide any more seriously? You're just pushing your segregationist agenda.
Oh, and it's data "are", not "is."
In principle, I generally believe in evidence based decision making. Its why I link to outside sources so often to support my arguments. But I don't believe in using data mindlessly. In evaluating evidence, you want to make sure that it is both relavant and reliable. That the evidence presented is germane to the issues being discussed.
In challenging Robert Moses' plans to redevelop NYC, one of the things Jacobs relied upon was something she referred to as local knowledge. She said that when outside experts made arguments or presented data and or models that were inconsistent with what the consensus of locals generally believed to be true, you should challenge the outside expert. Her point was that outside experts tend to ignore the lifetime of knowledge and expertise that locals pick up by living in an area and that specialised local knowledge has tremendous value too.
I don't know why you participate in online forums, but I do it because first and foremost I believe in what I am writing. People particate in online discussion forums to share and exchange their opinions. Its a format which inherently involves persuasive writing as well exposing you to people who disagree with your positions. I make no apologies for having an opinion. I like this format because when people challenge your opinions, its clarifies your reasoning and if often leads to you learning something new.
But no one has to be here. I would hope that you will continue to post here because I see value in people who see the world differently that I do. But if you don't see value in this or just don't like doing this anymore you also always have the option of not participating at any time. Everyone has the right to follow their own bliss.
As to my segregationist agenda. I see diversity and segregation as different sides of the same coin. When you homogenize something there is no segregation, but there is also no diversity.
I see self-segregation as an organic process that is mostly benign. People self segregate by race, by income, by marital status, by sexual orientation. Its what creates Russian neighborhoods and Vietnamese neighborhoods, college neighborhoods, gay neighborhoods, neighborhood with active social scenes and neighborhoods that are better suited for various modern notions of families. At work people again self-segregate by task. You have accounting firms, law firms, computer companies or government agencies where people self segregate in order to gain efficiencies in specialization. As I see it one of the primary reasons people move to cities is to take advantage of the opportunity to capture the gains that people get from specialization and finer degrees of self segregation. There is no diversity without segregation, they are two sides of the same coin.
In that natural world in the most vibrant habitats, whether its coral reefs or rainforest, the same processes are at work. You have different fauna depending on whether you are in the canopy, the middle of the rain forest or on the floor. You have high degrees of specialization and lots of different species filling lots of different niches.
Segregation is natural organic process that occurs most frequently in the most vibrant habitats. Its a sign of health in an ecosystem.
Actually you cannot apply the numbers that way. You are applying a hate crime against someone for sexual orientation against the population at large. A better comparison would be against the subgroup of homosexuals. Even that though would be tough without details on the actual crime.
Unfortunately I do not know of any reliable numbers of homosexuals by city. Like any group some cities will have a larger population of a subgroup than other cities so we cannot use a standard number like 10% or 7.2% to apply to all cities.
So it could be a difference in the number of homosexuals in a city.
Also just FYI, the FBI has pretty decent standards on the data from law enforcement. In fact they leave some areas out of the Universal Crime Reports due to the data not meeting their standard.
If you are arguing that the better comparison rate is reference to the number of homosexuals in the community but then saying that we don't have good numbers for it, again that suggests to me that the data isn't very useful for making inferences about the larger population.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FresnoFacts
The problem with anecdotal is that it gets skewed by individuals who see the world based on their value and belief system.
For example, just because an area has a high number of religious people doesn't mean it would be a problem for someone who is different. There are many churches that accept homosexuality. And many people attend a church but do not accept every single one of its teachings.
A different example about anecdotes would be ethicity/race. Some people see a Hispanic and assume the person is illegal. Or they assume they must be Mexican when they could be Central American. But that can be assumption not reality.
And the mind is an interesting thing, we can interpret things many different ways. Heck different eyewitnesses will remember the same event differently.
So anecdotal evidence can be very unreliable, more so than quantified. It is why it doesn't get relied on for many decisions.
There are also wisdom of crowds issues here. If one person has an opinion, I agree ancedotal information is of limited value. But when lots of people hold an opinion often it reflects the wisdom of crowds.
Surowiecki uses the example of knowing how many jellybeans are in a container. When a group of people make predictions, the weighted prediction of all of the answers is significantly closer to the correct number of jellybeans in the container than even the best guesser of all of the people in the room and that the ability of the group to guess the number of jellybeans in the container goes up by the size of the group.
He explains that when many individuals have various opinions regarding a particular event, there individual bias tend to cancel each other out, but the additional information of each group members belief adds to the accuracy of the group.
This is how he explains why the Iowa prediction market does better than the polls in predicting who will be president and a lot of other situations where crowds do much better than experts or any one individual.
If you are arguing that the better comparison rate is reference to the number of homosexuals in the community but then saying that we don't have good numbers for it, again that suggests to me that the data isn't very useful for making inferences about the larger population.
No, what I am saying is that if you want to compare it against the whole population you need to use all hate crimes not just those based on actual or perceived sexual orientation.
A person considered "fitting into the mainstream" is less likely to be the victim of sexual orientation hate crimes. But they could still be a hate crime victim for a different reason.
What would be most useful in this discussion is P(victim of a sexual orientation hate crime | homosexual living in Sacramento). But since we don't have the subset we can't calculate that.
But an idea of how likely the overall population is to be a victim of any type of hate crime or violence might be useful. That might indicate overall behavior in a city, i.e. a tendency to have violent reactions or behaviors.
So since we seem to be focused only on Fresno and Sacramento, lets consider a few bits of data.
Overall hate crime incidents in 2007 (all types related to race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or disability)
Sacramento 20 incidents for the year
Fresno 9 incidents for the year
Table 13-CALIFORNIA - Hate Crime Statistics 2007 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/table_13ca.htm - broken link)
Overall violent crime incidents in 2007 (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault)
City of Sacramento (population 460,546) - 5,128 total violent crimes
City of Fresno (population 472,170) - 3,043 total violent crimes
Table 8 (California) - Crime in the United States 2007 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_08_ca.html - broken link)
I think in the second set of data we have enough incidents to draw a very general conclusion, but it is probably not the answer people expected.
Based on the data in 2007 (and only for that year since I did not look at other years) Sacramento had more violence than Fresno.
The reasons? I don't know. We would need a lot more data to try to explain things at a deeper level than that.
And I'm not saying that Sacramento is a violent city, Fresno had some much worse numbers in the 1990s.
But between the 2 cities, Sacramento appears currently to be more violent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by edwardius
There are also wisdom of crowds issues here. If one person has an opinion, I agree ancedotal information is of limited value. But when lots of people hold an opinion often it reflects the wisdom of crowds. <snip for space only>
He explains that when many individuals have various opinions regarding a particular event, there individual bias tend to cancel each other out, but the additional information of each group members belief adds to the accuracy of the group.
This is how he explains why the Iowa prediction market does better than the polls in predicting who will be president and a lot of other situations where crowds do much better than experts or any one individual.
There are the problems of homogenity of the crowd or the emotional connection of the crowd. You can have a large crowd with similiar biases or views attempting to reach a decision.
Also to work, all viewpoints have to have the same weight. One or two individuals who are aggressive in their opinion, or shall we say more vocal, can overwhelm the crowd wisdom by converting others simply by being more powerful personalities.
Surowiecki himself has made comments about his concerns about the wisdom of crowds on the Internet. As he has expressed, the digital divide still creates homogenity on the web which limits the wisdom of the "Internet crowd". The demographics of the internet are still distinctly different than society at large.
Addtionally people self-select which message boards, threads, or blogs to visit. In other words you might gain homogenity on any single site since people with similiar opinions or demographics will be drawn to it. That limits the wisdom at any single website further.
The key is, as you say, to limit the bias of the crowd and have a large enough group of diverse opinions.
I'm just not sure we can get that on this site or in this thread.
In challenging Robert Moses' plans to redevelop NYC, one of the things Jacobs relied upon was something she referred to as local knowledge. She said that when outside experts made arguments or presented data and or models that were inconsistent with what the consensus of locals generally believed to be true, you should challenge the outside expert. Her point was that outside experts tend to ignore the lifetime of knowledge and expertise that locals pick up by living in an area and that specialised local knowledge has tremendous value too.
But you're making assumptions about a place that you don't seem to know very well at all, which leads me to question any off-the-cuff assumptions you make about the place. And callmesteph's statements border on outright lies. So I challenge them.
Specialized local knowledge is what I am using here. I live in midtown Sacramento, and what I see is a large, diverse, very open gay/lesbian community. Some posters here seem bent on pushing an image of Sacramento as a place where gays cower in fear, and slope-foreheaded NASCAR fans in pickup trucks prowl the street with baseball bats looking for gays to bash. That's obviously nonsense, from the evidence of my own senses and experience, and I don't appreciate your apparent efforts to feed that kind of nonsense.
There is a profound difference between diversity and homogeneity. Midtown has a variety of neighborhoods, differing in style and character and population, and many who choose to move down here do so because they are actively seeking a place with such variety close at hand.
Jane Jacobs' descriptions of her kind of street life was a place of profound diversity, with people of different incomes, politics and ethnic backgrounds in close contact. It does not exclude self-sorting or aim to eliminate culture. The objective is to enjoy and celebrate those differences, not homogenize them.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
