Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

odds-2

2022-12-24 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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odds-2
Votey panel for odds-2
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Explanation

This comic plays on the misuse of base rate statistics to downplay risk. A woman tells a passerby that "BASE-JUMPING is NOT dangerous" because "a random person is TEN MILLION TIMES more likely to get killed doing old age than base-jumping." The statistic sounds impressive but is deeply misleading: the vast majority of people never base-jump at all, so of course far more people die of old age in absolute terms. Per participant or per hour of activity, base-jumping is extraordinarily dangerous.

The joke is about the rhetorical trick of comparing raw totals rather than per-capita or per-exposure rates to make a dangerous activity sound safe. The caption -- "Weekend activity: Murdering people with statistics" -- makes the gag explicit: the woman is weaponizing misleading statistics, presumably to lure people into dangerous behavior. It satirizes how statistics can be presented in technically true but profoundly deceptive ways.

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