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Ari Schulman Profile picture
@AriSchulman
Aug 4, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
There are too many definitions, making the figures much too malleable to narrative. The one that best captures the everyday meaning of "mass shooting" is the FBI's "active shooter incident" designation, with 14 per year since 2000 — steadily rising: fbi.gov/about/partners…
A more commonly cited definition for a mass shooting is 4 or more victims killed. It's a bad definition for what people are talking about here. It includes things like family and gang-related murder, and excludes last week's Gilroy shooting, where "only" 3 people died.
RAND has a helpful article here on the different definitions and how they produce estimates varying by 2 orders of magnitude: rand.org/research/gun-p…
Of commonly cited stats, only those from the FBI and Mother Jones take lack of motive — that is, no intent of robbery, domestic violence, or gang violence, just attempting to kill as many innocent people as possible — into account. Others should be disregarded.

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More from @AriSchulman

Ari Schulman Profile picture
Nov 8, 2022
I remember hearing Nate Silver interviewed by a big-name reporter about the model showing Clinton with 65% odds. The reporter says "Okay, 65%, put that in context—how often does someone with that big a lead win?" There's an awkward pause. Silver says: "Well, 65% of the time."
The reporter of course doesn't get the significance of the answer, just offers a sort of, huh, very informative, and moves on.
The thing is, the one who was failing to grasp what was really happening in this exchange wasn't the interviewer, it was Silver.
Read 10 tweets
Ari Schulman Profile picture
Nov 8, 2022
Putting this handful of reply tweets into the timeline:
Imperfect analogy, but this account of democracy feels like arguing that a marriage certificate not only constitutes a marriage, but is all that constitutes a marriage.
If you go to certain Melanesian islands and find long strips of pavement and wave your hands around in just the right way, will huge quantities of food drop from the sky? Well, sort of, yes! Under the right conditions. (Namely: If it's 1942 and you are a soldier for Tojo.)
Read 4 tweets
Ari Schulman Profile picture
Nov 7, 2022
In virtually every case where engineers view their life mission as "saving humanity," it's a huge win for society if they can be successfully diverted from it.
The scientists/engineers who've done the most for the survival of the species were driven primarily by ordinary careerism and a tinkerer's obsessiveness. The ones who set out specifically to "save humanity" wind up either trying to destroy it or founding a rationalist subreddit.
(But I repeat myself.)
Read 4 tweets
Ari Schulman Profile picture
Oct 19, 2022
This article is based on a remarkable falsehood: "at nine weeks the nascent embryo is not discernible to the naked eye."

At 9 weeks of pregnancy, a human embryo is 3/4 to 1 inch long — med books compare it to a penny or a peanut. My naked eye can see that and yours can too.
Suggesting what @suzania argues here. It's not a small detail but the entire sustained claim of the piece — everyone's been duped that you can see embryos at that stage. Whether the error was deliberate or not, the article should be retracted.
Here are images of embryos up to week 8, with scale. At week 9 they are another 50% or so longer. By week 4-5 the embryo is easily visible to the naked eye. Image
Read 4 tweets
Ari Schulman Profile picture
Aug 31, 2022
Planting one quick flag, for the record: Not just with hindsight but knowably at the time, the masking flip-flop was an unforced error. Public health should have recommended it 4-6 weeks earlier, and before that there was no reason to belittle the public for considering the idea.
That posture of condescension set the tone for much to follow, and it was throughline when, in March, public health otherwise did a 180, not just on masks but broadly, from downplaying the risk and worrying that precautions were irrational to pushing hard on restrictions.
My Times piece on Dr. Fauci has dropped right as we're on the finish line with sending the Fall 2022 issue of @tnajournal to the printer, but I'll have more to say soon.
Read 4 tweets
Ari Schulman Profile picture
Aug 31, 2022
For those coming to my feed from my Times piece, I'm placing this here as a show that it's not an exercise in Monday-morning quarterbacking. I've been writing about public health's dysfunctional relationship to science, and to the public, since 2015: thenewatlantis.com/publications/t…
That article has a lengthy investigation of the masking question in particular, in the context of Ebola and SARS.
From 2015: "the broader institutional factors that led to the failures of public health in 2014 remain unchanged. We must understand and fix these problems, for the next outbreak may be of a disease more contagious than Ebola, and even worse understood." thenewatlantis.com/publications/t…
Read 5 tweets

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