Tuesday, April 10, 2018

It's not what they know, but that so much they know isn't so

Listened to this very good speech by Andrew Klavan:


In the Q&A, one of the students came up and asked about the problem with a society that allows so much violence against transgender people, claiming that 2000 transgender people were killed in the past year.


I looked up some stats. Here Human rights campaign says 28 transgender people were murdered in 2017, the highest ever recorded and mostly by people they know. This is out of 17500 murders in the US in 2016, or 0.16% of total murders.

According to Wikipedia, transgender people are 0.3% of the population. Therefore transgender murders are a tiny number and actually less than their percentage of the population by about half.

But there is a woman in college who believes that transgender murders represent almost 12% of all US murders, and obviously never bothered to spend the 3 minutes I did to check the numbers.

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