Stats

A courteous and open request to the media, in particular the German media in this instance, for less terror-hype and a little more rational reflection.
According to our legal school, that of Imam Malik, as well as the three other schools of Shafii, Abu Hanifa and Ibn Hanbal, may Allah be pleased with them all, suicide [bombing] is strictly forbidden and punished by the Lord of the Worlds with eternal Fire.
As Shaykh Sidi al Jamal has said, the Shaykh of Shaykh ad-Darqawi:
‘One single man can illuminate a whole city, while a whole city cannot illuminate a single man’
Although statistics are generally – and often deliberately – misleading, as our footnote below illustrates, the following recent postings by government, semi- governmental and mainstream media must have some meaning:
14,551 persons (10,922 men and 3,629 women) ‘died in Germany in 2012 as a result of excessive alcohol consumption – four times more than road deaths’, see the official website of the German government organ das Statistische Bundesamt (Destatis) – and therefore approximately:
3,500 accident-related road deaths occurred last year. These two statistics are obviously a great improvement on the following statistic from one leading German newspaper some years ago, and points to the success of certain government campaigns to heighten awareness of the dangers of alcohol but it does not go far enough:
74,000 deaths from alcohol – see: Die Welt am Sonntag, 27.06.10;
1,002 deaths from illegal drugs in 2013 – see the highly-regarded German website Statista – Das Statistik-Portal;
550 deaths through aids in 2013 in Germany – see again Das Statistik-Portal;
110 000 to 140 000 deaths in 2014 in Germany associated with diseases arising from tobacco – this taken from the website: Gesundheit – Zahlen, Daten, Fakten.
3.300 deaths from passive smoking, see: www.kreuzbund.de/de/das-suchtproblem-in-deutschland.html. Almost akin to murder, what?
36,000 deaths – it was reported in the leading German magazine, Der Spiegel, 27.11.2014, that this number of persons died in 2012 as a result of mental illnesses and behavioral imbalances, and that this number is increasing alarmingly annually – and:
150 deaths caused by a deranged pilot just recently.
One could go on to list the number of killings in domestic and sexual violence of husbands, wives and children, of murders through criminals and deaths through medical negligence, but suffice the following:

0 – not a single death in German speaking territory in the last 2000 years, or longer, i.e. since written records exist, has been caused through terror attacks attributed to Muslims.
So as Nietzsche might recommend: A little more attention to encouraging the treatment of drunkards and lunatics, drug-addicts, sexual extremists, social misfits and those prone to road-rage, rather than volk-related rumour mongering. Imam Malik’s teaching stresses the prioritization of actions: some are important, some less so. A top priority for our society here in Germany in the light of the above statistics would appear to be a return to health and sanity in the media.

Footnote:

During the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecution made much of the fact that Simpson had a record of violence towards his wife. In response, Simpson’s legal team argued that, of all women subjected to spousal abuse, only one in 2,500 was subsequently killed by the abusive husband. It was hence implied that, since the ratio of abusers to killers was so high, any evidence about the accused’s prior violent behaviour was insignificant.

This sounds plausible. However, there is another way to consider the statistics. According to the German academic Gerd Gigerenzer, we are not trying to predict whether a husband will murder his wife: Simpson’s wife inarguably had been murdered, so instead, we should ask the question backwards: given that a battered wife has been murdered, what are the odds that the husband did it? Gigerenzer calculates that ‘the chances that a batterer actually murdered his partner, given that she has been first abused and then killed, is about eight in nine’.

This is a case where a statistical sleight of hand normally called ‘the prosecutor’s fallacy’ worked for the defence. What is interesting is not merely that we are confused but the degree of our confusion: the presentation of the data affects our judgment by factor of thousands: from 0.04 per cent to 90 per cent. We need to be alert to this kind of error, particularly since computers and ‘big data’ make it easy to generate spurious but plausible statistics on almost any subject.

High-profile criminal cases seem plagued by peculiar mental biases. In particular, they seem to cause people to polarise around only two opposing theories of ‘what happened’.

I felt slightly vindicated when I finally heard that the British police were investigating the possibility that the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was the result of a burglary attempt gone wrong. Since planned abduction by a paedophile is so rare, it struck me as odd that no one much considered this more probable option.

Press and internet commentary seems to amplify the either/or effect. If you want to see this tendency at its most extreme, the online reaction to the trials of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is a textbook case. The two camps, the Colpevolisti and Innocentisti, operate entirely separate, partisan websites: which site you see first will affect your assessment of Knox and Sollecito’s guilt enormously. I have to say here that using Occam’s razor — or even Occam’s nasal hair-trimmer — should incline you towards believing the pair are more likely to be innocent than guilty. Burglaries gone wrong seem more common than sex games turned murderous. The investigating authorities formulated theories before evidence was available, and were reluctant to modify them, instead creating further bizarre theories to support their initial assumptions — a tendency known as ‘privileging the hypothesis’. Had the DNA and fingerprint evidence implicating Guede been available at once, would the investigation have proceeded as it did? Almost certainly not.

But few commentators discuss the case in terms of probabilities — it is all about certainty first, evidence later. This tendency is probably innate. But Gigerenzer believes it can be corrected: ‘Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty — geometry, trigonometry — and spend little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty. Statistical thinking could be taught as the art of real-world problem solving.’

German schools are beginning to adopt his approach. Britain (and Italy) should follow.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.