Who's Making News? --a site tracking sex crimes against children

[Sympthsical]

14. I did. Here's the problem

And I've seen this sentiment on DU. Where someone will say, "Almost all mass shootings are by white people."

People really honestly believe this. It's said allllllll the time here. However, it's untrue. It's closer to a smidge over 50%.

However, if you're only getting curated information that is far likelier to report white shooters and discuss them, you're going to get that impression. Over time, that filtering leads to a false belief. But, hey, you see it with your own eyes. It must be true!

It's like watching ancient people figure out astronomy. It's there. They see the stars. They're going to use their point of reference to find patterns. Their point of reference is the stars circle the earth. That's what they see. Must be true. If you start from a place of limited information, your conclusions won't be sound.

This person is going about data collection in such a way as to rely on heavily biased online media reports and webcrawlers.

It's literally garbage from a data standpoint. She admits it herself. "Those non-media reported cases will, therefore, not be reflected in the data." And she relies on people sending her reports. Guess who's likely to even know about her, much less send her reports?

If it's not reported, it didn't happen. Her data collection is heavily tilted to see a specific kind of information.

That's not how statistics work if you want good, objective data on a topic.