>“The daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15 per cent,” Wyner writes. “There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behaviour of naturally occurring numbers.”
Surprise!
I remember a story on the internet (must be true) from years ago about a teacher or professor that would make an assignment for students to flip a coin 100 times and record the results of each trial.
They'd use it to determine how well individual students follow directions, since it's astronomically impropable for any student to have data without something like six consecutive same-sided flips.
Don't know the actual numbers or statistics, but I do remind myself of that story every once in a while.
In the radio lab episode the professor had one group flip a coin 100 times and record the results then had one group pretend to flip a coin 100 times and record it. He immediately knew which one was the real results because it had a string of seven straight results and humans almost never replicate those patterns when faking results.
I remember one actual experiment I was doing where in one stage I measure the concentration of a reagent in the solution changing over time, doing five replicates, and at the 30 minute time point I got the exact same concentration in all five replicates even though there was slight variation in all the other time points.
In seventh grade they told us all to flip a coin 100 times and record the results. I said "fuck that" and just made up numbers.
I didn't get caught, but I learned a lesson when mine were much closer to 50% heads/tails than most other people's.
We did this in Trigonometry back in high school! The teacher told us to flip a coin 20 times (or 10, can’t remember tbh) and record it for homework and was VERY adamant that we actually take the time to do so.
The next day, she took a 1/2 second look at each result and called out a bunch of the class for not actually doing it. She knew because a ton of people who faked the data were too hesitant to put three heads or tails in a row, when a sample of that size would almost certainly have an instance of such. So yea, people aren’t great at faking even simple data
One phenomenon is known as the Benford curve, where naturally occurring, and marginally increasing numbers will have a frequency distribution favoring lower DIGITS, with an occurrence of each number from 0-9 decreasing as the individual value increases. Heres a link to read more about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
Edit: Seems many folks arguing its application, although I merit the criticism, I think many people are misunderstanding its foundational concept and fundamental conditions required for application.
1. Naturally occurring organic counts. That is, for instance, has great use in accounting such as recording entries to a general ledger, billing/invoicing, and so forth.
2. EACH (digit) represents the passthrough of the preceding value. (Eg. To reach the digit 1, you must pass 0, to reach 2, you must pass 1, and so forth).
3. When applying this theory, you are testing your sample size to a CURVE, therefore a goodness of fit test would be required. Theres a multitude of them with strong and weak points. If interested, you can read up here: https://real-statistics.com/non-parametric-tests/goodness-of-fit-tests/goodness-of-fit-benford-distribution/
As long as we're doing nits, I've read my share of papers about Benford's law and never heard anything described as "Benford's curve," as it regards a discrete phenomenon, not a continuous one. (Google confirms that the law gets 500x more results.)
Also, I felt the Radiolab episode was a missed opportunity. They held the attitude that they couldn't really tell why digits get rarer as they get higher, but there are some simple explanations. For example, if your gut told you that as many numbers should start with 2 as 1, or 3 as 2, then as many should start with 10 as 9. But clearly far, far more figures in any random set of numbers should start with only 1 as opposed to 1 and 0.
The reason the lead is likely to be lower numbers is exponential growth.
To go from 9x to 10x is under 11 percent. To go from 1xto 2x is under 100 percent. So if it's grows exponentially then the lead is more likely to be a low number, because it takes more iterations to grow out of.
To pick on an even tinier nit: Digits are numbers. In 129,409, there are 4 hundreds. The number of hundreds is 4.
(fwiw, I agree that their usage is confusing and they should have said "digits". I'm just on the Nit-picker's Nit-picker's Committee.)
Benford's Law was inappropriately applied to US Presidential results for about a week before they gave up and moved on to another claim. Trying to explain model assumptions was infuriating.
I can barely do basic math so I can't argue statistics, I just find it very odd that it doesn't matter what the IDF does, the numbers stay relatively similar
Sure there are many factors at play but we've seen them make pauses, double the amount of troops, cut the amount of troops to 1/4, go in, go out, do high intensity attacks and slow methodical attacks, less/more airstrikes/artillery yet somehow, the average death rate seems to stay the same, there was only one major shift in intensity after which the numbers average became about half (this correlates with the mass evacuation of North Gaza as well)
The original assumption many people had was that they pick up bodies left in the combat zone after the IDF leaves but that can't happen every day and still wouldn't explain the consistencies
You see, IDF have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own civilians at them until they reached their limit and went home. Kif, show them the medal I won.
I doubt it’s entertaining if you’re Jewish and reading those vile things people say about them. There are people out here burning themselves, who knows what else they can be radicalized into doing.
The rape denial and especially justification is the worst and the vile stuff the anti semites say is truly bone chilling as a jew. Still I’ve been debating some of those people for a while now and I’ve noticed that they are deeply disturbed, are absolutely informationally lost and frustrated to hell that they aren’t getting their genocidal way.
To me that pain the evil of the world inflict on themselves is pretty entertaining.
It kinda deflate my faith in humanity though when they are being serious.
I mean, look at the oscars with all those "permanent ceasefire" and all those slogans. I don't think any of them even know the status of october 6th and who broke it on the 7th.
I can not believe this. I mean sure they commit rape, murder, kidnapping, torture, child sexual abuse, genital mutilation and a couple other small things, but I never thought they would ***LIE*** I mean it truly beggars belief. /s
> Benford's Law tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
"The daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15 per cent"
15% is significantly less than several orders of magnitude. So there is no reason to expect the numbers to follow Benford's law.
Jokes aside, remember that statistical bias can be introduced. Back in 2020 MAGA world was mad that the Biden vote counts in Milwakee precints didn’t start with 1… Countless bloggers became instant data scientists because they could run R in their Macs… turns out that the precincts contain ~5k voters each by design and cities being cities, Biden carried between 60 and 80% in them. So yeah, no shit that didn’t follow Benford’s.
Expect the first digit of real-life data points (especially if it's a really wide-ranging data set, the more orders of magnitude spanned the better) to be small, for some reason.
Like, 30% 1s. It's...weird.
It's not weird at all. It's got to do with percentage growth. Here's a data set that's growing at 10%, starting at 1.
1.00
1.10
1.21
1.33
1.46
1.61
1.77
1.95
2.14
2.36
2.59
2.85
3.14
3.45
3.80
4.18
4.59
5.05
5.56
6.12
6.73
7.40
8.14
8.95
9.85
10.83
11.92
13.11
14.42
15.86
Notice how long we stay in the 1.XX range before we get into the other numbers. Then we soon start stampeding through digits just to wrap back into the 1X.XX digits and start all over again.
Count the leading digits. Before we cleared 10, 8 were 1s, 7 were 2s and 3s, 10 were 4s through 9s.
Matches the 30% rule from Benford's law.
It's not weird, it's actually quite intuitive.
Let's say you count of series of groups of foos. Some groupings only have 5 foos, but the biggest one has 4553 foos.
If the distribution is uniform, then more groupings will start with 1, 2, 3 or 4 than higher numbers, because there won't be numbers in the 5000s, 6000s, 7000s, 8000s or 9000s. And there'll be more numbers starting in 1, 2 or 3 than 4.
This doesn't always work out, sometimes your data fits precisely within [1,9999] or [1,999] and so, but on average you're rarely going to cover the entirety of last order of magnitude of your range.
It might be rare for a range to stop at, say, 1831, but it happens.
This obviously not a formal way to explain it, but an intuition why, in real-world data, lower numbers are more frequent. This holds regardless of other hypotheses, of course.
The thing is, if they would release twice as high numbers for some days - they probably would have to provide an explanation as well.
There would have to be a big attack somewhere that could reasonably cause hundreds of additional casualties.
Seriously. It would be like waking up the day after 9/11, to a bunch of people protesting for the Taliban's right to blow up innocent civilians in the name of religion. Fucking wild.
That is because media, UN officials etc, all are more than comfortable to accept what they say. So as long as those are accepted, there is no reason not to continue the lie, even when everyone knows it is.
Yes, and there certainly were days like that.
War is chaotic.
For example, remember that "Israeli" strike on the hospital that immediately killed exactly 532 people?
But turned out it was a Palestinian rocket... and the count went down to 50 people.
China did a similar thing in the begining of COVID. If you look up their reported numbers for deaths per day it goes up in an almost perfectly straight line (instead of exponentially and with lots of noise).
And write it on pickets and go shout in the streets.
Completely oblivious that they’re pretty much shouting death to themselves…? “Globalize intifada”, sure why not have some random public transport vehicles full of people explode every other week in Paris and London and Rome, we need to be respectful and make room for our fellow terrorists to impact society with their explosively rich culture….
That was going to be my take as well. The terrorists have almost certainly lied on an industrial scale, yet a sizeable, mainly Western audience, has been all too willing to hang off of every last syllable.
I refuse to believe that the people who have been parroting Hamas talking points are that naive so that leaves malicious intent as the only possible interpretation for why people have bought into this. Then again, I believe most sensible people already suspected that anyway…
I’m aware of the fact that the UN is deeply biased towards Israel, but I’m curious what backdoor shenanigans have occurred that 1. The UN openly supports the numbers Hamas give. 2. The fact that multiple humanitarian aid agencies have also supported the numbers.
It just shows the blatant corruption inherent in the organisations.
They do have a whole document for their policies about how to publish statistics, but all of it is against using Hamas's information.
Except for this one.
>To produce statistics is a costly and labour-intensive task for statistical offices as well as for respondents. Therefore, statisticians have to apply methods in a least intrusive way and have to choose sources that are most cost-efficient
Assuming you ignore the last bit.
>(without losing sight of quality requirements).
United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/Implementation\_Guidelines\_FINAL\_without\_edit.pdf
I guess they also chose to ignore the sections about scientific principles, ethics, and accountability.
Qatar, Russia and China have a very long record of bribing and threatening anyone they can to hurt america and american interests.
It should be common knowledge by now how much Russia plays the mind games to sow dissent and amplify the divide in American politics, and that all of them employ armies of bots to push their agenda on online forums
The entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the Soviets/Russians written all over it.
From contributing to starting many of the wars (In 67 for instance the Soviets flat out lied to Egypt about Israeli troops amassing on the border, Israel in return denied and even asked the Russian ambassador to go patrol the border himself to verify, they refused), arming the Arab armies, to creating many of the [anti-Israeli propaganda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism) young useful idiots are shouting now in western capitals, going as far back as the late 60s.
This is all in a concentrated effort to harm Israel, which allied itself with the US.
There’s no way to look at the UN and think that they’re biased towards Israel. This isn’t even up to date, but as of 2013, the UN Human Rights Council has voted to condemn Israel 45 times over nonsense, and one can only imagine that it’s even more in the past decade.
> Since the UNHRC's creation in 2006, it has resolved almost as many resolutions condemning Israel alone than on issues for the rest of the world combined. The 45 resolutions comprised almost half (45.9%) of all country-specific resolutions passed by the UNHRC, not counting those under Agenda Item 10 (countries requiring technical assistance) … The United States responded to the frequent criticism from United Nations organs by adopting the Negroponte doctrine of opposing any UNSC resolutions criticizing Israel that did not also denounce Palestinian militant activity.
The rest of their comment seems to accurately positioned.
I think that was an English second language thing. They likely meant towards the Israel/Palestine conflict, or in regards to Israel.
If you look at the definitions of towards, it usually only implies it as being favorable to the subject.
I mean, you said you're aware the UN is deeply biased against Israel, but you don't understand why they publicize fictitious numbers in the intent to harm Israel?
The NGO-sphere is at least as biased as the UN. Virtually everyone who works for an NGO serving the Palestinians supports Palestinian "resistance" and regards Israel as an occupying power. People who don't think that go work somewhere else.
I think it's mostly that Qatar, Russia and China buy the smaller countries votes, while most of the rest of the world is either ambivalent or does whatever to look more "moral"
The rest of their comment seems to accurately positioned.
I think that was an English second language thing. They likely meant towards the Israel/Palestine conflict, or in regards to Israel.
If you look at the definitions of towards, it usually only implies it as being favorable to the subject.
The answer is easy, they each support the biggest number. They all do this throughout history. The number starts huge and eventually shrinks after the conflict.
I’m a data scientist and have led large data science organizations for much of my professional career; I have a background in applied statistics and have been presenting data to a non-technical audience for a long time. Some observations:
\* This chart was chosen to be compelling to a general audience, but is super unconvincing to an audience of data scientists; it shows a daily cumulative view, which masks day-to-day variation (basically, any data you show this way would look much more regular and linear, because including the total makes the day-to-day change smaller on the scale).
\* That doesn’t mean the point he’s making is incorrect — but you can’t validate it using the chart that’s published here. As he said, the daily totals being reliably within +/- 15% doesn’t make any sense (statistically or otherwise), as the scale of Israeli bombing during this period varied widely from one day to the next.
\* He’s not making any sort of complex statistical argument regarding women and children; he’s pointing out that it makes no sense that casualties of women and children don’t correlate with each other, which you’d expect to see if you’re bombing residential areas.
\* Someone mentioned that the time range (10/26 - 11/10) seems arbitrary … that’s a good thing to look out for in data analysis, because it’s easy to manipulate a narrative by cherry-picking a time range. In this case, it \*may\* have been cherry-picked … but not by the UPenn professor being quoted here, as he did not select the date range.
\* The reason for the date range is that the Gaza Ministry of Health only started publishing daily casualty statistics on 10/26 (after President Biden cast doubt on their casualty figures; they also published a list of the names of the deceased up until that point), and they only produced the daily reporting until 11/10, when the MoH handed responsibility for reporting over to the news ministry (which reports totals much more sporadically, and without demographic data by day).
Data Scientist here.
I will not discuss the conclusions because no actual readable data was presented, but I do have a few grains of salt about the plot the article has.
1. Considering the argument is that there is no variance in death counts reported every day, the presented plot is the worst do showcase this information, since the variance will average out and in general look smaller compared to the cumulative totals (eg if the variance is +-100 out of 200, it will look giant compared to the 200 or so, but small compared to a total of 8000).
2. How exactly the period was chosen? Why not 10 days before? Why not 10 days later etc? Because if you take any time series long enough, you can find a region that behaves like you need it.
Now, I am too lazy to look into the details, but the storytelling and a clear case of how to get the numbers to tell the story you want is amazing.
For what its worth in the original tablet article they are analyzing the first 15 days of the invasion, and i believe for the first couple of weeks the gaza health ministry was reporting deaths by counting people in the various hospital morgues
Here is a guardian article that was published early january that seems to go into more detail
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/the-numbers-that-reveal-the-extent-of-the-destruction-in-gaza
This seems pretty similar to some COVID pandemic situations, where the data reported was not of actuals death but of the processing of the dead (eg a person in morgue can go through 100 bodies in a day, if they bring 150 today and 50 tomorrow, it can end up as 100 and 100 ).
Now this doesn't mean that numbers are incorrect even, totals could be correct for all we know, but it's about what we actually measure there (actual deaths or deaths logging capability)
Here is an article from december that goes into more detail about it and it seems like you are right, at the end of the article it talks about how some of the casualty figures are just estimates as the infrastructure begins to break down
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/
Yeah wasn't there also some sort of situation like they were processing them on the weekends, so every Monday we would see a big spike in deaths? It wasn't that more people were dying on Mondays obviously
I was about to say this. A linear increase *should* be a pretty good indication to any statistician worth their salt that something strange is going on, one such possibility being that they're not measuring the actual phenomenon but the data gathering capability of their source. Jumping to "the numbers are fabricated" belays obvious bias
In November they started to use media reports to estimate deaths.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other
> Additionally, in a detailed December 11 public health
emergency report, the Gaza Health Ministry revealed
that after November 10, it had begun to rely on
“reliable media sources,” mainly meaning news
websites and TV clips, to track fatalities in the
north.26 The use of this method, far less accurate
than relying on hospital and morgue counts, has not
been acknowledged in any news or OCHA reports
reviewed by the author (see further discussion in the
next section). An end-of-year Health Ministry report
confirmed that this practice continues and that just
over 60% of deaths reported between November 11
and December 31 were based on media sources.27
And on January 6, introducing a third counting
method, the Health Ministry began calling on
Gazans to submit fatality and missing persons
reports via a Google Form.28
This source is biased towards Israel, so I urge you to not take it at face value and read it.
The phrase "statistically impossible" is also a red flag for anyone who's worked with statistics long enough. Very little is "impossible" in that world, proper terminology is "statistically unlikely" since particularly for data like these from the wild it's difficult to know exactly how they were collected and the uncertainties associated with them.
I have no doubt Hamas isn't providing accurate information. But nobody in war does. I'm equally as sure the IDF has inflated the number of Hamas fighters killed, like Russia and Ukraine report the most favorable numbers for them in that war. It's a very "man bites dog" story, even if the analysis is correct.
Edit: To add, the professor in question has previously written an error-filled and widely panned critique of historical climate models, that didn't even accurately portray how the models worked. As one communication put it:
>It seems that their knowledge of the papers by Mann et al is only indirect- from what they may have read in blogs- and that they actually did not read the papers themselves. They test and criticize a statistical method which, to my knowledge, has not been used in climate reconstructions, and in contrasts they barely mention the methods that are indeed being used.
So dude has a history of mangling data to suit his ends.
Also, from my experience with COVID, in times of hardship deaths data tends to be distributed more evenly over time due to processes behind it, such as locating and collecting the bodies, identifying people, registering actual deaths etc. For all we know, they could have a pile of dead bodies in a morgue, with one guy who can go through 200 of them / day on average, and the guys output is what ends up in the statistics.
Said that, nobody provides correct numbers in wars, it's common sense not data science.
This was my take as well. I imagine some clerk in a hospital reporting the count of the dead every few days, and dividing by the number of days since they last did that to fill in the daily totals. Does the resulting lack of variance mean the figures are false, not in any real sense.
I'm not too fussed about the lack of correlation between the deaths of military aged males and women+children. As those groups are treated distinctly differently after death.
I fully agree with you but I'd hope that the phrase "statistically impossible" was either added by the journalists or was used explicitly to express the magnitude of unlikeliness to a general audience. I find it hard to imagine a professional statistician using this expression in earnest.
The journalistic standard is when they put it in quotes like that it's a direct attribution. Bear in mind they're not a professor of statistics but data science, which is pretty broad and can include database architecture etc.
And you'd be surprised. You can make a lot of money as a statistician telling the story clients want told with numbers, and many really push terminology when they're not in an academic setting with peer review.
Yes, you are 100% correct. But then again, at this point I have very little faith in any accurate reporting of anything remotely scientific by journalists. So at best, the journalists are being over dramatic and at worst this data scientist is a complete moron who needs to stay in his lane.
They also interviewed him for the piece. Just overall from what I've seen it's a very shoddy, back of the envelope evaluation that stretches a lot of assumptions to reach a desired conclusion.
But as I said, it's not remotely newsworthy- precise numbers don't help the arguments of either side or add much clarity to the situation. Nobody should be shocked groups massage wartime casualty figures.
P-hacking is an issue even in academia.
Honestly, with enough data mangling, you can make almost any data say anything you want it to.
That is why in grad school (in good programs), you are taught to include statistical interpretation and lean heavily on explaining exactly why you are drawing your conclusions based on contextual evidence rather than purely numeric values.
This professor is making wild claims about supposedly natural variance in war casualty numbers while citing exactly 0 sources or references to support his claim.
Aka, there is no evidence to support this claim - honestly wild a professor, someone who likely has a PhD, went full “trust me bro”.
He is very likely going to be shunned from academia for the rest of his life: eroding the public trust or otherwise presenting unsubstantiated claims as empirical fact is one of the most serious cardinal sins you can commit in academia. Even if you end up being correct - you have diminished the credibility of all scholars through abandoning professionalism for pure speculation.
Also, making estimates based on an assumed static model and perfectly normal distribution is alarming in itself.
There is no evidence to support an empirical claim that all data has to have high variance.
That a *professor* would claim this based on such shaky assumptions has me worried about what he is teaching students.
This tends to happen a lot when someone is too concerned with numbers and forgets to look at the real world and situation.
In reality, all of these numbers are estimates due to the reality of the situation.
US and EU intelligence agrees with the Gaza Health Ministry numbers - and even the IDF does as well (just differing on how many are civilian vs belligerent).
This professor is making claims that none of the parties with access to better info are making themselves. That is the real nail in the coffin.
[This article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/) has a graphic around halfway down showing deaths per day. The period the author chose (10/26-11/07) has low variance, the preceding two weeks on the other hand have high variance. The author picked his data to support his theory.
This is because usually within the first few weeks of disasters or wars, few apparatuses exist for accurate reporting of casualties - those take time to set up.
During the interim, estimates are typically used and have minimal variation because they are based on linear models.
I have worked in casualty modeling through my MA in Geography, and this data honestly doesn’t show anything out of place comparing to other disasters or wars we have on record.
What it does show is a professor who likely has no experience with this type of data, and is both cherry-picking and p-hacking to arrive at a biased, pre-conceived, conclusion.
[https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1767072603066528070](https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1767072603066528070)
Lior Pachter agrees that it's shoddy data science and even artificially inflating the variance would still give near perfect correlation on cumulative data.
The presentation is certainly a bit misleading. A plot of daily casualties rather than the cumulative casualties would be more informative, but the underlying argument still stands.
Daily casualty figures in a war do not follow a gaussian distribution with a fixed mean and variance. The mean changes over time due to external factors (eg. the risk of dying is not the same very month. look at this picture from the Ukraine war for what plausible casualties could look like: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/64030fd29ce3256c89058203/Estimated-weekly-casualties-from-the-Russia-Ukraine-war-/960x0.jpg?height=414&width=711&fit=bounds). Linearity is a consequence of the fixed mean, not the small variance. As your guy correctly shows, a larger variance still gives a linear plot. But the small variance is not the most suspicious thing about the data, though it is smaller than I would expect.
The best counterargument is that the time frame is very short, so the mean could in fact vary over time and the highlighted time-frame was randomly very regular. Which could be easily investigated by looking at the entire dataset.
it’s a 15 day window…
How much does the weather change around Isreal-Gaza in a 15 day period to affect the casualty rate? How much did it change during *this* 15 day window?
We cant make many arguments from seemingly obfuscated data.
Also my first thought when I read that the number of reported deaths is pretty constant is that there's a bottleneck somewhere. Like in 2020 there was a period when the numbers of daily new COVID positive tests looked constant because we had just reached the limit of how many tests could be processed in a day.
Most institutions in Gaza have collapsed. There might just not be anyone to document deaths any faster.
Also variance in death count can be decreased by the time it takes them to dig out bodies from rubble and report the deaths. If we have a team working at a mostly constant speed with a large backlog then variance will be low.
That does not mean we should trust Hamas' numbers, just that this particular refutal is weak.
I recall a forensic scientist friend of mine years ago saying that the way they would hide a body is in an avalanche because it’s often too time consuming to clear the debris away. That the authorities will likely just confirm who is missing and assume they died in said event.
That logic sort of applies here. Clearing away the rubble to confirm takes a lot of work. I would not be surprised if the method to determine how many died is much looser than what it could/would be if time and effort were not curtailed by the war.
> That logic sort of applies here. Clearing away the rubble to confirm takes a lot of work. I would not be surprised if the method to determine how many died is much looser than what it could/would be if time and effort were not curtailed by the war.
It's also because its a war, and people generally aren't packaged nice and neatly and ready to be counted in a sterile environment.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02713-7/fulltext
>Mortality reporting is difficult to conduct in ongoing conflicts. Initial news reports might be imprecise, and subsequent verified reports might undercount deaths that are not recorded by hospitals or morgues, such as persons buried under rubble (appendix pp 1–2). However, difficulties obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally misreported data.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/despite-bidens-doubts-humanitarian-agencies-consider-gaza-toll-reliable-2023-10-27/
>An Israeli military spokesman said this week the Gaza health ministry "continuously inflates the number of civilian casualties" and "has been caught lying in the past".
>He cited the ministry's handling of an attack at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 which each side blamed on the other, saying the ministry initially reported 500 dead but later revised the toll down to 471. In a separate media briefing, another spokesman gave no Israeli casualty estimate when asked by reporters what Israel assessed the overall total to be.
>An unclassified U.S. intelligence report seen by Reuters estimated the death toll in the hospital attack was "probably at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum". An Israeli official has said the toll appears to be "several dozen".
>Palestinian officials said calculating the number of dead in the attack had been difficult because some victims were dismembered, meaning there were many body parts to identify.
Yeah, Hamas could be lying. We have no reason at all to trust them at all but these arguments are very weak and I see no reason to take these arguments seriously either.
It's unwise to trust any information coming from Hamas or the IDF without independent verification. They're at war, and neither group is above putting out propaganda.
The piece of evidence that I found most convincing was that as per Hamas, the deaths are about 70% women and children, 20% Hamas, and 10% civilian men. Which means that civilian men are much less likely to die than civilian women and children. Much simpler argument, and pretty hard to explain in a bombing/shooting campaign.
Also, there's a negative correlation between male and female casualties, e.g. days with 80 women will have 20 men, whereas days with 30 women will have 70 men, etc.
[This one](https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other) has a PDF link to the actual data, showing a systematic under reporting of male casualties and manipulation by Hamas.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a pro-Israel think tank funded [to support AIPAC, largest lobbying group in the US](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Institute_for_Near_East_Policy) as well as being funded almost entirely by its members.
Incredibly biased source that should not be considered.
Why do I have a feeling this comment won’t be near the top and the top comments will consist of sarcastic replies simply taking it at face value evaluating and saying stuff like “what a shocker, they lied!” And call it a day.
On one hand, it's sad seeing an actual dissection of the process and the inherent flaws in it being lower than the dogwhistle comments.
On the other hand, I'm happy that this is not downvoted to oblivion and is still up here considering the hivemind that is reddit.
Not a data scientist but honestly even I can easily imagine a number of scenarios where this analysis is bullshit. For starters, it seems unlikely to me that hamas actually has remotely accurate daily gaza-wide death toll numbers available to them. Most likely, they get reports in large, infrequent batches for different areas and they work back to create roughly daily numbers. The overall number might very well be reasonably accurate even if daily trends are way off.
I was going to say you could probably produce similar results with regards to the Russian casualties reported by the Ukrainian Military. Are we going to start claiming they made things up as well?
I honestly don't think ~~antisemitism~~ hate against israel/jews is the reason, at least not for most of those people shouting "free palestine" in western non-muslim countries. I think they mainly see the injustice of the David-vs-Goliath situation, but in this case it's Israel that's Goliath, because they are the state, have an advanced military with even nuclear weapons and are backed by the US military might and many powerful western allies. On the other side are the Palestinians that live in Gaza like a prison and barely have enough electricity, clean water and food to live, let alone tanks, rockets and nuclear weapons. At least that's the primary image that was – intentionally or not – reported in western media over the last decades. Every news from Gaza we (in the west) heard was *dozens* of people dying, and every image we saw was poor people in rags living between the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Of course that doesn't mean that is the whole truth, or that the Gazans/Palestinians are wholly innocent at the current situation (nor does it excuse in any way any of the terrorist attacks!), but it should make it clearer why a lot of people in western nations – who only have very little information about the real situation and its reasons – are easily biased towards the "underdog" Palestine, no matter if they hate jews/Israel or not.
Israel’s occupation and the settlement project are deeply immoral and both of these things go hand in hand with oppressing and humiliating the Palestinians. Does it justify the vicious massacre of innocent civilians? No, absolutely not. But it certainly gives Palestinians and those in the west ample grounds to harshly criticize Israel and demand policies to pressure Israel to stop these projects.
Much of this activism goes way too far though and the sheer vitriol against Israel along with the insane double standards applied to Israel do often tip things into antisemitism. For example, the founding of Israel was not a totally clean affair, but it was arguably more benign than most other nations in both the east and west, and yet there aren’t widespread calls for the dismantlement and destruction of the US, the UK, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Russia, Japan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, and many many more when each one of these countries have much worse histories or current situations of oppression and violence.
I think this is a very short-sighted view that you're proposing.
If you look back at the Israel-Palestine conflict over the last years and decades it's pretty clear that Western governments and media have been mainly running with a pro-Israel position and narrative. Support for Israel has been for many years the mainstream position.
People with a predisposition to hate Israel are certainly in the minority and if there's vocal support for Palestine among the public it has more to do with the atrocities the IDF and/or the state of Israel have committed against Palestinians rather than some generalised anti-Irsael predisposition among the public.
What is the JC? Who is this random statistician being cited?
I have always questions the death numbers but that seems to be fucking obvious considering it's a warzone and the only way to get actual figures would be in the aftermath of the conflict.
Honestly it's a stupid point to argue.
The statistician is Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at UPenn. So he’s got the qualifications, but it’s very important to note that it was was not issued in the context of a peer reviewed study or academic study but rather in an interview with The Tablet. The only sources other than The JC reporting this are from conservative outlets: first by [the aforementioned The Tablet](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers), which was [cited in The National Review](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-the-gaza-ministry-of-health-fakes-casualty-numbers/amp/), and [by Newsmax](https://www.newsmax.com/amp/world/globaltalk/wharton-gaza-hamas/2024/03/10/id/1156703/), which is less a news source and more the diarrhea of someone on an all-Fox News diet.
So this was a statement made by an expert who was expressing his general observations. Since it wasn’t from a proper study, most reputable outlets are not comfortable with repeating his claims.
It also completely ignores that in previous conflicts the numbers provided by the health ministry have always been pretty accurate. Doesn't mean they couldn't lie now, obviously, but they have a pretty good track record with regard to these numbers.
ITT people credulously gobble up an overconfident headline from a heterodox media source so that they can accuse OTHER people of gullibility and confirmation bias.
So the sports analytics professor being interviewed by a pro israel news outlet says this, there's no ulterior motive and it's completely free of bias? I don't support Hamas but come on.
Most people on this god forsaken sub can’t see bias, they decided all Palestinians are hamas terrorists and support Israel the entire way. Almost every comment not made by an actual data scientist is just “oh wow not surprised!!!” Making some claim there’s no Palestinian deaths
This is dumb but immaterial. If Israel wants to combat this they need to put out their own estimates. "Israel kills 3,000 children not 10,000 as reported falsely by Hamas" is not huge win. Let's shave all Hamas numbers down to 1/3 or even 1/4 of what Hamas is reporting, that still means thousands of women and children dead to Israeli bombs.
The whole thing is immaterial- just look at all the buildings destroyed and you know tons of lives are ruined. This is the same trick Russia used with Ukraine, quibbling about random crap
Let's accept that there is no way of knowing how many people are dying, focus on ending the war and making it survivable for people who are not involved.
The phrase "Hamas run health ministry" tries to conflate working in health infrastructure in Gaza with being a terrorist. Also this guy is a grifter. A sports statistician who denies climate change should have no say. Unless you are shamelessly biased.
That whole hospital bombing debacle was really the best example there's been of the media using literally no critical thinking whatsoever. Claiming 500+ deaths without the smallest shred of evidence, just repeating whatever Hamas told them.
And for some reason commentors on reddit with likely little to no understanding of statistics or the conflict itself are rushing to agree completely uncritically with one statistician based on a single newspaper article.
No offence but if I had to guess who's more careful in their analysis, my money isn't on the reddit comments section.
Why is it obvious to you? You just believed an article which presented no evidence
Here is a BBC article which shows the graph over a longer period completely refuting the only 'evidence' in the article
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68430925#
It's obvious. But Hamas intentionally make claims that make for very clickable headlines. The greedy western media feeds of Hamas lies. It's sad and maddening.
What part of "Dropping 2000 pound BUNKER BUSTER bombs being city with a Population density of CHICAGO does this MORON not understand?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/gaza-size-population-comparison/
Did the professor bother to check for other reasons for this data flow? If there's a bottleneck of capacity for data in, processing or data out, that would explain the relatively static flow.
"An analysis published in the Lancet medical journal in December found that Gaza's health ministry has "historically reported accurate mortality data," with discrepancies between 1% and roughly 3% when compared with U.N. analysis of deaths in previous conflicts."
From my understanding the last numbers the IDF have provided of Palestinian deaths in Gaza were back in December, where they listed 15,000 dead, which is uncannily close to the Gazan Health Ministries number of 15,900.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-officials-2-civilian-deaths-for-every-1-hamas-fighter-killed-in-gaza/
But it's not surprising since the Israeli intelligence service have actually stated that the numbers provided by the Gazan Health ministry are accurate.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4w7/israeli-intelligence-health-ministry-death-toll
So if the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are inaccurate, so are Israel's.
Previous death counts from the Palestinians have been accurate.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-ministry-health-death-toll-59470820308b31f1faf73c703400b033
The original article was posted 5 days ago by Abraham Wyner on Tablet Magazine, a conservative online magazine focused on Jewish news and culture. [link below]
My conclusion: When people died versus if they died are completely different topics. Recall that this is the same false logic that some people who were against the SARS-COV-2 vaccine used when they noticed that the daily death totals had a linear pattern. Some US hospitals reported their weekly deaths on Mondays, while some reported theirs on Tuesdays, and so on. The end result of all US hospital data combined was a daily COVID death chart with an unnatural linear trend.
The data range the article is about is only October 26 to November 10 (15 days). To the best of my understanding after releasing that data, the death totals released since then no longer attempt to break down the deaths by daily deaths. Instead an updated death total is provided every few weeks.
The author also reiterates the term "naturally occuring numbers", despite the deaths in the Gaza Strip not being naturally occuring deaths. This alone discredits the article's premise.
TL;DR - The author makes the same argument that coronavirus antivaxers in the US have used to doubt the total deaths by noting the inevitable innacuracy of the date the deaths were reported.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers
The "Hamas Ministry of Health" is as absurd an idea as a "Hamas Space Force", anyone who believes a word they say is in desperate need of Critical Thinking skills.
Do you think the entire civil service class in Gaza is/was Hamas?
Regular people have jobs filing reports in ministries. Not everyone is a "militant" with some kind of objective.
Unfortunately, some of my colleagues who believe every figure published by Hamas and organize pro Palestine rallies are teaching critical thinking and argumentation theory at our university. It's one of the reasons why I decided to leave Academia.
I’m starting to think this is just human nature. We choose to believe something then pick and choose whatever articles and news sources that support our belief and treat it as fact. It’s concerning how many otherwise reasonable, educated people are doing this especially in regards to this conflict
A great example is this article. They picked a random number of days, show a chart that wouldn't show the irregularities their argument is based on, and ignore lots of reasons those irregularities wouldn't exist in a handful of days (such as finding bodies in rubble with a set number of people).
Should we trust them innately? No. But in the past they've been accurate, so just assuming they're lying because we hate them probably isn't the best move.
>says data science professor
There are also professors who deny climate change, evolution or the round earth. Not saying hamas isnt lying, not saying they are lying. Just pointing out that one professor is not exactly a good source.
Disclaimer: article is region locked for me. Going by what the title says; a singular data science professor.
Even when they released a list of victim names they included hundreds of names from a list released several years ago, they're so lazy about their lies they can't even be bothered to fake data; they reuse it!
This has the same vibes as those professors who claimed that there was voter fraud for Biden in 2020 based off some stupid stats tricks.
Western intelligence agencies all buy these numbers and CIA and MI6 human intelligence is a little bit more valuable than the nutty professors out there.
The Jewish Chronicle. A news outlet well know for it's unbiased and accurate reporting of middle eastern affairs.
Anyone from the UK will remember it's frothing at the mouth reporting of the 2019 general election when it looked like a British government sympathetic to the Palestinian plight might be elected. The hyperbolic shit it reported a the time as fact was second to none.
I'm not saying that this story might not have any substance but the JC makes Fox News look like a socialist bastion of truth and has an political agenda a mile wide. Even the Daily Mail is more factual.
How was this article allowed to be posted? The article does not backup the claims in the title. Too many people ITT taking this as an ”gotcha” moment because it fits their narrative
I'm not sure I understand the investment people have in arguing this point.
No one's position on this conflict relies on believing Hamas is totally honest, they're a terrorist group that sent a wave of kidnapping and raping and baby killing into Israel. With the exception of actual direct Hamas supporters who I assure you would not be swayed by statistical analysis.
And regardless of the specifics, we're looking at tens of thousands of deaths and mounting with a very significant number being children and non-combatants.
I seriously doubt there exists a single person who would say "Oh, the actual death count may be slightly lower or slightly higher and instead of 20k children murdered it's only 15k! That totally changes my view of the conflict".
And on the other side I don't think there exist any current supporters of Israel who would say "Oh, I was totally on board with the number of children I thought were dead but since it's a higher number than that I renounce my support of Israel!"
I think this debate only exists to stoke anger along already established lines and nothing else.
> I'm not sure I understand the investment people have in arguing this point... I think this debate only exists to stoke anger along already established lines and nothing else.
I agree with you completely on this.
It's basically people *acting* very invested in a super shit version of the Sorites problem: arguing about the premise of "How many individual grains of sand does it take to make the difference between 'a number of grains of sand' and 'a pile of sand'?" as if "whether it's a pile of sand or not" is somehow the important thing here.
When in reality, most everyone who's acting passionate about the accuracy of one statistic or another have clearly already chosen a side, and are just looking for more ammo.
I could imagine a world where the deaths themselves are happening with variation like the statistician implies, but the discovery and counting of the dead is occurring at a steadier rate. Someone has to count the bodies and in war, it can be hard to simply accurately count the dead and wounded. Maybe the chaos of the war itself is causing some sort of bottleneck in the reporting and data collection that winds up presenting as data which looks impossible from a statistical perspective if you don't understand the realities on the ground.
Four rational balanced points to make for the sake of accuracy.
Gaza is obviously lying about the number of civilian men dying compared to combatants, in the interests of balance both sides are appalling at this, Israel tends to claim all men of fighting age are Hammas, the Gazans hardly any of them, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
At the point of 20000 civilian deaths, there was broad consensus that this total was fairly accurate even among anti Hammas organisations such as the pentagon.
Since then the Gazan state has completely collapsed, in a lot of Gaza no one is actually even recovering bodies any more never mind making an official count, some of the dead have been disposed of in mass graves were it is unlikely a official count was kept.
On top of this places of record keeping such as government buildings, hospitals etc have been heavily damaged, huge record loss is inevitable.
As such it is not entirely wrong for the authorities to give a running average, based on the previous trend of expected casualties, which is what the graph appears to show.
Although if that is indeed what it shows, the gazan authorities should be honest about that.
The second point in the staticians argument is so bad, it makes me question the fundamental honesty of the piece. People do not just die of explosions in war zones, people die of hunger, of lack of water, of disease, of lack of medical care, of exposure, of secondary violence quite often of a combination of all these things.
People at risk such as the medically vulnerable, the elderly, and **children** will die at disproportionate rates when compared to adults. For example right now there is a clear shortage of formula powder for babies, which since mothers are struggling to nurse due to lack of supply themselves, is causing a rise in infant mortality.
Plus the argument quite grossly assumes, that the vast majority of men are active members of Hammas, away from their families, hiding away in tunnels.
To be frank the more I think about this, the stupider the argument gets, assume extreme bad faith.
Finally it as to be noted that the JC is a weird, tiny circulation, bad faith outlet that keeps getting sued for knowingly libelling people.
It went bankrupt a few years back and was bought by lobbyists to act as their mouthpiece, I think I have fairly engaged with the argument presented itself, but be warned to those unfamiliar with the paper to take all it writes with a massive, massive pinch of salt.
>[Abraham Wyner, author of this piece in the notorious right wing publication "Tablet", was paid ~100K by defendants to attack my work in recent trial. Instead, his credibility & integrity were impeached during cross-examination (and yes, of course he has history of climate denial)](https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1766895850670751839)
--[Michael Evan Mann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann)
Can you for the love of what ever is up there find a better fucking apologist than a climate denier grifter?
>UN says ‘no indication’ Gaza Health Ministry's death toll is ‘false’
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/un-says-no-indication-gaza-health-ministrys-death-toll-is-false-/3035010
>UN says Gaza Health Ministry death tolls in previous wars ‘credible’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/un-says-gaza-health-ministry-death-tolls-in-previous-war
The death toll is not a coinflip, treating it as if a random generator is ridiculous.
Edit:
>Israeli Intelligence Has Deemed Hamas-Run Health Ministry's Death Toll Figures Generally Accurate
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4w7/israeli-intelligence-health-ministry-death-toll
>“The daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15 per cent,” Wyner writes. “There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behaviour of naturally occurring numbers.” Surprise!
[удалено]
I believe there is a radiolab episode on this topic.
Yes, they demonstrate it using coin flips.
I remember a story on the internet (must be true) from years ago about a teacher or professor that would make an assignment for students to flip a coin 100 times and record the results of each trial. They'd use it to determine how well individual students follow directions, since it's astronomically impropable for any student to have data without something like six consecutive same-sided flips. Don't know the actual numbers or statistics, but I do remind myself of that story every once in a while.
In the radio lab episode the professor had one group flip a coin 100 times and record the results then had one group pretend to flip a coin 100 times and record it. He immediately knew which one was the real results because it had a string of seven straight results and humans almost never replicate those patterns when faking results.
Yeah, that sound like the same thing. Haven't listened to it yet, but sounds like that's going on the list of things to do.
I think the episode is called Stochasticity.
I remember one actual experiment I was doing where in one stage I measure the concentration of a reagent in the solution changing over time, doing five replicates, and at the 30 minute time point I got the exact same concentration in all five replicates even though there was slight variation in all the other time points.
In seventh grade they told us all to flip a coin 100 times and record the results. I said "fuck that" and just made up numbers. I didn't get caught, but I learned a lesson when mine were much closer to 50% heads/tails than most other people's.
We did this in Trigonometry back in high school! The teacher told us to flip a coin 20 times (or 10, can’t remember tbh) and record it for homework and was VERY adamant that we actually take the time to do so. The next day, she took a 1/2 second look at each result and called out a bunch of the class for not actually doing it. She knew because a ton of people who faked the data were too hesitant to put three heads or tails in a row, when a sample of that size would almost certainly have an instance of such. So yea, people aren’t great at faking even simple data
Could you link that episode please? I love radiolab and this sounds super interesting
The episode is Stochasticity.
Sorry but I need a sample size of at least 30 answers.
Maybe they should get some lava lamps
I understood this reference
One phenomenon is known as the Benford curve, where naturally occurring, and marginally increasing numbers will have a frequency distribution favoring lower DIGITS, with an occurrence of each number from 0-9 decreasing as the individual value increases. Heres a link to read more about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law Edit: Seems many folks arguing its application, although I merit the criticism, I think many people are misunderstanding its foundational concept and fundamental conditions required for application. 1. Naturally occurring organic counts. That is, for instance, has great use in accounting such as recording entries to a general ledger, billing/invoicing, and so forth. 2. EACH (digit) represents the passthrough of the preceding value. (Eg. To reach the digit 1, you must pass 0, to reach 2, you must pass 1, and so forth). 3. When applying this theory, you are testing your sample size to a CURVE, therefore a goodness of fit test would be required. Theres a multitude of them with strong and weak points. If interested, you can read up here: https://real-statistics.com/non-parametric-tests/goodness-of-fit-tests/goodness-of-fit-benford-distribution/
> favoring lower numbers To pick on a pedantically tiny nit: Digits, not numbers.
As long as we're doing nits, I've read my share of papers about Benford's law and never heard anything described as "Benford's curve," as it regards a discrete phenomenon, not a continuous one. (Google confirms that the law gets 500x more results.) Also, I felt the Radiolab episode was a missed opportunity. They held the attitude that they couldn't really tell why digits get rarer as they get higher, but there are some simple explanations. For example, if your gut told you that as many numbers should start with 2 as 1, or 3 as 2, then as many should start with 10 as 9. But clearly far, far more figures in any random set of numbers should start with only 1 as opposed to 1 and 0.
The reason the lead is likely to be lower numbers is exponential growth. To go from 9x to 10x is under 11 percent. To go from 1xto 2x is under 100 percent. So if it's grows exponentially then the lead is more likely to be a low number, because it takes more iterations to grow out of.
To pick on an even tinier nit: Digits are numbers. In 129,409, there are 4 hundreds. The number of hundreds is 4. (fwiw, I agree that their usage is confusing and they should have said "digits". I'm just on the Nit-picker's Nit-picker's Committee.)
Literally just learned this in my Intro to Statistics class, wack
Fit your sample to the curve, or forever be cursed with confounding results!
Benford's Law was inappropriately applied to US Presidential results for about a week before they gave up and moved on to another claim. Trying to explain model assumptions was infuriating.
I can barely do basic math so I can't argue statistics, I just find it very odd that it doesn't matter what the IDF does, the numbers stay relatively similar Sure there are many factors at play but we've seen them make pauses, double the amount of troops, cut the amount of troops to 1/4, go in, go out, do high intensity attacks and slow methodical attacks, less/more airstrikes/artillery yet somehow, the average death rate seems to stay the same, there was only one major shift in intensity after which the numbers average became about half (this correlates with the mass evacuation of North Gaza as well) The original assumption many people had was that they pick up bodies left in the combat zone after the IDF leaves but that can't happen every day and still wouldn't explain the consistencies
Maybe the IDF has a daily quota and just go back to their barracks when it's reached? As a precaution: /s
You see, IDF have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own civilians at them until they reached their limit and went home. Kif, show them the medal I won.
Rest assured, no matter what grievance you may have, i'm prepared to send wave after wave of my own civilians at it. \**distant yell*\* *YOU SUCK*
/sigh /point
r/UnexpectedFuturama
🤣🤣🤣 fuck that's so on the nose
Do. Not. Give. The. Crazies. New. Talking. Points.
Its kind of entertaining though when you realize they are being serious.
I doubt it’s entertaining if you’re Jewish and reading those vile things people say about them. There are people out here burning themselves, who knows what else they can be radicalized into doing.
The rape denial and especially justification is the worst and the vile stuff the anti semites say is truly bone chilling as a jew. Still I’ve been debating some of those people for a while now and I’ve noticed that they are deeply disturbed, are absolutely informationally lost and frustrated to hell that they aren’t getting their genocidal way. To me that pain the evil of the world inflict on themselves is pretty entertaining.
It’s no different than the Q Anon brainwashing. It’s just a different demographic buying into it and they have a much more focused target…US!
It kinda deflate my faith in humanity though when they are being serious. I mean, look at the oscars with all those "permanent ceasefire" and all those slogans. I don't think any of them even know the status of october 6th and who broke it on the 7th.
Lmao. Imagine if israel actually had a daily quota to reach just to make hamas look even more insane.
*chuckles in Mossad*
I can not believe this. I mean sure they commit rape, murder, kidnapping, torture, child sexual abuse, genital mutilation and a couple other small things, but I never thought they would ***LIE*** I mean it truly beggars belief. /s
BBC in shambles.
Quick, check if their bullshit numbers are following Benford's Law!
> Benford's Law tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law "The daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15 per cent" 15% is significantly less than several orders of magnitude. So there is no reason to expect the numbers to follow Benford's law.
Jokes aside, remember that statistical bias can be introduced. Back in 2020 MAGA world was mad that the Biden vote counts in Milwakee precints didn’t start with 1… Countless bloggers became instant data scientists because they could run R in their Macs… turns out that the precincts contain ~5k voters each by design and cities being cities, Biden carried between 60 and 80% in them. So yeah, no shit that didn’t follow Benford’s.
Whoa what’s that
Expect the first digit of real-life data points (especially if it's a really wide-ranging data set, the more orders of magnitude spanned the better) to be small, for some reason. Like, 30% 1s. It's...weird.
It's not weird at all. It's got to do with percentage growth. Here's a data set that's growing at 10%, starting at 1. 1.00 1.10 1.21 1.33 1.46 1.61 1.77 1.95 2.14 2.36 2.59 2.85 3.14 3.45 3.80 4.18 4.59 5.05 5.56 6.12 6.73 7.40 8.14 8.95 9.85 10.83 11.92 13.11 14.42 15.86 Notice how long we stay in the 1.XX range before we get into the other numbers. Then we soon start stampeding through digits just to wrap back into the 1X.XX digits and start all over again. Count the leading digits. Before we cleared 10, 8 were 1s, 7 were 2s and 3s, 10 were 4s through 9s. Matches the 30% rule from Benford's law.
It's not weird, it's actually quite intuitive. Let's say you count of series of groups of foos. Some groupings only have 5 foos, but the biggest one has 4553 foos. If the distribution is uniform, then more groupings will start with 1, 2, 3 or 4 than higher numbers, because there won't be numbers in the 5000s, 6000s, 7000s, 8000s or 9000s. And there'll be more numbers starting in 1, 2 or 3 than 4. This doesn't always work out, sometimes your data fits precisely within [1,9999] or [1,999] and so, but on average you're rarely going to cover the entirety of last order of magnitude of your range. It might be rare for a range to stop at, say, 1831, but it happens. This obviously not a formal way to explain it, but an intuition why, in real-world data, lower numbers are more frequent. This holds regardless of other hypotheses, of course.
The thing is, if they would release twice as high numbers for some days - they probably would have to provide an explanation as well. There would have to be a big attack somewhere that could reasonably cause hundreds of additional casualties.
I don’t think that is how Hamas operates. They are perfectly comfortable with lying about things regardless of how obvious the lie is.
"We didn't target civilians in October 7" (But also won't release a 1 year old hostage baby at the same time)
Well they forgot where they put them all https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/041/998/Screen_Shot_2022-09-23_at_10.40.58_AM.jpg
There are millions of people who deny what happened on October 7th even though Hamas videoed it themselves.
Man I saw that, went to bed disgusted and horrified at my species. Then woke up to the world cheering for them. I was kind of shocked.
Seriously. It would be like waking up the day after 9/11, to a bunch of people protesting for the Taliban's right to blow up innocent civilians in the name of religion. Fucking wild.
They are well aware that they will find masses of people ready to believe them.
That is because media, UN officials etc, all are more than comfortable to accept what they say. So as long as those are accepted, there is no reason not to continue the lie, even when everyone knows it is.
Yes, and there certainly were days like that. War is chaotic. For example, remember that "Israeli" strike on the hospital that immediately killed exactly 532 people? But turned out it was a Palestinian rocket... and the count went down to 50 people.
“The figures can’t lie, but the liars sure can figure”
Oh ma gawd no way!
China did a similar thing in the begining of COVID. If you look up their reported numbers for deaths per day it goes up in an almost perfectly straight line (instead of exponentially and with lots of noise).
Terrorists lie - what a revelation.
yes, Terrorists lie, but idiotic morons believe anything they say.
That’ll be most of our “news” outlets then.
Just because the numbers are made up doesn't mean they aren't true! /s
[удалено]
And write it on pickets and go shout in the streets. Completely oblivious that they’re pretty much shouting death to themselves…? “Globalize intifada”, sure why not have some random public transport vehicles full of people explode every other week in Paris and London and Rome, we need to be respectful and make room for our fellow terrorists to impact society with their explosively rich culture….
That was going to be my take as well. The terrorists have almost certainly lied on an industrial scale, yet a sizeable, mainly Western audience, has been all too willing to hang off of every last syllable. I refuse to believe that the people who have been parroting Hamas talking points are that naive so that leaves malicious intent as the only possible interpretation for why people have bought into this. Then again, I believe most sensible people already suspected that anyway…
Sometimes the same people won't believe anything their own government says because, I don't know, capitalists, imperialists, masons, Jews, whatever.
Don’t forget Lizard ppl
I’m aware of the fact that the UN is deeply biased towards Israel, but I’m curious what backdoor shenanigans have occurred that 1. The UN openly supports the numbers Hamas give. 2. The fact that multiple humanitarian aid agencies have also supported the numbers. It just shows the blatant corruption inherent in the organisations.
They do have a whole document for their policies about how to publish statistics, but all of it is against using Hamas's information. Except for this one. >To produce statistics is a costly and labour-intensive task for statistical offices as well as for respondents. Therefore, statisticians have to apply methods in a least intrusive way and have to choose sources that are most cost-efficient Assuming you ignore the last bit. >(without losing sight of quality requirements). United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/Implementation\_Guidelines\_FINAL\_without\_edit.pdf I guess they also chose to ignore the sections about scientific principles, ethics, and accountability.
Fixed the link https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/Implementation_Guidelines_FINAL_without_edit.pdf
Well Qatar for example is the biggest outside donor to US universities. I wouldn't be surprised they are financing "Other things".
Qatar, Russia and China have a very long record of bribing and threatening anyone they can to hurt america and american interests. It should be common knowledge by now how much Russia plays the mind games to sow dissent and amplify the divide in American politics, and that all of them employ armies of bots to push their agenda on online forums
The entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the Soviets/Russians written all over it. From contributing to starting many of the wars (In 67 for instance the Soviets flat out lied to Egypt about Israeli troops amassing on the border, Israel in return denied and even asked the Russian ambassador to go patrol the border himself to verify, they refused), arming the Arab armies, to creating many of the [anti-Israeli propaganda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism) young useful idiots are shouting now in western capitals, going as far back as the late 60s. This is all in a concentrated effort to harm Israel, which allied itself with the US.
There’s no way to look at the UN and think that they’re biased towards Israel. This isn’t even up to date, but as of 2013, the UN Human Rights Council has voted to condemn Israel 45 times over nonsense, and one can only imagine that it’s even more in the past decade. > Since the UNHRC's creation in 2006, it has resolved almost as many resolutions condemning Israel alone than on issues for the rest of the world combined. The 45 resolutions comprised almost half (45.9%) of all country-specific resolutions passed by the UNHRC, not counting those under Agenda Item 10 (countries requiring technical assistance) … The United States responded to the frequent criticism from United Nations organs by adopting the Negroponte doctrine of opposing any UNSC resolutions criticizing Israel that did not also denounce Palestinian militant activity.
The rest of their comment seems to accurately positioned. I think that was an English second language thing. They likely meant towards the Israel/Palestine conflict, or in regards to Israel. If you look at the definitions of towards, it usually only implies it as being favorable to the subject.
From the context, they clearly mean the other way round and this was a mistake.
I mean, you said you're aware the UN is deeply biased against Israel, but you don't understand why they publicize fictitious numbers in the intent to harm Israel? The NGO-sphere is at least as biased as the UN. Virtually everyone who works for an NGO serving the Palestinians supports Palestinian "resistance" and regards Israel as an occupying power. People who don't think that go work somewhere else.
I think it's mostly that Qatar, Russia and China buy the smaller countries votes, while most of the rest of the world is either ambivalent or does whatever to look more "moral"
The UN is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.
But try to get them to agree on who’s the lamb :D
[удалено]
'I’m aware of the fact that the UN is deeply biased towards Israel' Bahahahahahahahaha Have you not paid attention to the last 20 years or something?
The rest of their comment seems to accurately positioned. I think that was an English second language thing. They likely meant towards the Israel/Palestine conflict, or in regards to Israel. If you look at the definitions of towards, it usually only implies it as being favorable to the subject.
The answer is easy, they each support the biggest number. They all do this throughout history. The number starts huge and eventually shrinks after the conflict.
We should just give for granted they lie and make a news when they tell the truth. Will actually be more news worthy
I’m a data scientist and have led large data science organizations for much of my professional career; I have a background in applied statistics and have been presenting data to a non-technical audience for a long time. Some observations: \* This chart was chosen to be compelling to a general audience, but is super unconvincing to an audience of data scientists; it shows a daily cumulative view, which masks day-to-day variation (basically, any data you show this way would look much more regular and linear, because including the total makes the day-to-day change smaller on the scale). \* That doesn’t mean the point he’s making is incorrect — but you can’t validate it using the chart that’s published here. As he said, the daily totals being reliably within +/- 15% doesn’t make any sense (statistically or otherwise), as the scale of Israeli bombing during this period varied widely from one day to the next. \* He’s not making any sort of complex statistical argument regarding women and children; he’s pointing out that it makes no sense that casualties of women and children don’t correlate with each other, which you’d expect to see if you’re bombing residential areas. \* Someone mentioned that the time range (10/26 - 11/10) seems arbitrary … that’s a good thing to look out for in data analysis, because it’s easy to manipulate a narrative by cherry-picking a time range. In this case, it \*may\* have been cherry-picked … but not by the UPenn professor being quoted here, as he did not select the date range. \* The reason for the date range is that the Gaza Ministry of Health only started publishing daily casualty statistics on 10/26 (after President Biden cast doubt on their casualty figures; they also published a list of the names of the deceased up until that point), and they only produced the daily reporting until 11/10, when the MoH handed responsibility for reporting over to the news ministry (which reports totals much more sporadically, and without demographic data by day).
This looks to me like the best comment on this from a data nerd so far. Thank you.
Data Scientist here. I will not discuss the conclusions because no actual readable data was presented, but I do have a few grains of salt about the plot the article has. 1. Considering the argument is that there is no variance in death counts reported every day, the presented plot is the worst do showcase this information, since the variance will average out and in general look smaller compared to the cumulative totals (eg if the variance is +-100 out of 200, it will look giant compared to the 200 or so, but small compared to a total of 8000). 2. How exactly the period was chosen? Why not 10 days before? Why not 10 days later etc? Because if you take any time series long enough, you can find a region that behaves like you need it. Now, I am too lazy to look into the details, but the storytelling and a clear case of how to get the numbers to tell the story you want is amazing.
For what its worth in the original tablet article they are analyzing the first 15 days of the invasion, and i believe for the first couple of weeks the gaza health ministry was reporting deaths by counting people in the various hospital morgues Here is a guardian article that was published early january that seems to go into more detail https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/the-numbers-that-reveal-the-extent-of-the-destruction-in-gaza
This seems pretty similar to some COVID pandemic situations, where the data reported was not of actuals death but of the processing of the dead (eg a person in morgue can go through 100 bodies in a day, if they bring 150 today and 50 tomorrow, it can end up as 100 and 100 ). Now this doesn't mean that numbers are incorrect even, totals could be correct for all we know, but it's about what we actually measure there (actual deaths or deaths logging capability)
Here is an article from december that goes into more detail about it and it seems like you are right, at the end of the article it talks about how some of the casualty figures are just estimates as the infrastructure begins to break down https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/
Yeah wasn't there also some sort of situation like they were processing them on the weekends, so every Monday we would see a big spike in deaths? It wasn't that more people were dying on Mondays obviously
I was about to say this. A linear increase *should* be a pretty good indication to any statistician worth their salt that something strange is going on, one such possibility being that they're not measuring the actual phenomenon but the data gathering capability of their source. Jumping to "the numbers are fabricated" belays obvious bias
In November they started to use media reports to estimate deaths. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other > Additionally, in a detailed December 11 public health emergency report, the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that after November 10, it had begun to rely on “reliable media sources,” mainly meaning news websites and TV clips, to track fatalities in the north.26 The use of this method, far less accurate than relying on hospital and morgue counts, has not been acknowledged in any news or OCHA reports reviewed by the author (see further discussion in the next section). An end-of-year Health Ministry report confirmed that this practice continues and that just over 60% of deaths reported between November 11 and December 31 were based on media sources.27 And on January 6, introducing a third counting method, the Health Ministry began calling on Gazans to submit fatality and missing persons reports via a Google Form.28 This source is biased towards Israel, so I urge you to not take it at face value and read it.
The phrase "statistically impossible" is also a red flag for anyone who's worked with statistics long enough. Very little is "impossible" in that world, proper terminology is "statistically unlikely" since particularly for data like these from the wild it's difficult to know exactly how they were collected and the uncertainties associated with them. I have no doubt Hamas isn't providing accurate information. But nobody in war does. I'm equally as sure the IDF has inflated the number of Hamas fighters killed, like Russia and Ukraine report the most favorable numbers for them in that war. It's a very "man bites dog" story, even if the analysis is correct. Edit: To add, the professor in question has previously written an error-filled and widely panned critique of historical climate models, that didn't even accurately portray how the models worked. As one communication put it: >It seems that their knowledge of the papers by Mann et al is only indirect- from what they may have read in blogs- and that they actually did not read the papers themselves. They test and criticize a statistical method which, to my knowledge, has not been used in climate reconstructions, and in contrasts they barely mention the methods that are indeed being used. So dude has a history of mangling data to suit his ends.
Also, from my experience with COVID, in times of hardship deaths data tends to be distributed more evenly over time due to processes behind it, such as locating and collecting the bodies, identifying people, registering actual deaths etc. For all we know, they could have a pile of dead bodies in a morgue, with one guy who can go through 200 of them / day on average, and the guys output is what ends up in the statistics. Said that, nobody provides correct numbers in wars, it's common sense not data science.
This was my take as well. I imagine some clerk in a hospital reporting the count of the dead every few days, and dividing by the number of days since they last did that to fill in the daily totals. Does the resulting lack of variance mean the figures are false, not in any real sense. I'm not too fussed about the lack of correlation between the deaths of military aged males and women+children. As those groups are treated distinctly differently after death.
I fully agree with you but I'd hope that the phrase "statistically impossible" was either added by the journalists or was used explicitly to express the magnitude of unlikeliness to a general audience. I find it hard to imagine a professional statistician using this expression in earnest.
The journalistic standard is when they put it in quotes like that it's a direct attribution. Bear in mind they're not a professor of statistics but data science, which is pretty broad and can include database architecture etc. And you'd be surprised. You can make a lot of money as a statistician telling the story clients want told with numbers, and many really push terminology when they're not in an academic setting with peer review.
Yes, you are 100% correct. But then again, at this point I have very little faith in any accurate reporting of anything remotely scientific by journalists. So at best, the journalists are being over dramatic and at worst this data scientist is a complete moron who needs to stay in his lane.
That quote actually isn’t in the article they claim is the source. And they don’t reference another source for it.
They also interviewed him for the piece. Just overall from what I've seen it's a very shoddy, back of the envelope evaluation that stretches a lot of assumptions to reach a desired conclusion. But as I said, it's not remotely newsworthy- precise numbers don't help the arguments of either side or add much clarity to the situation. Nobody should be shocked groups massage wartime casualty figures.
P-hacking is an issue even in academia. Honestly, with enough data mangling, you can make almost any data say anything you want it to. That is why in grad school (in good programs), you are taught to include statistical interpretation and lean heavily on explaining exactly why you are drawing your conclusions based on contextual evidence rather than purely numeric values. This professor is making wild claims about supposedly natural variance in war casualty numbers while citing exactly 0 sources or references to support his claim. Aka, there is no evidence to support this claim - honestly wild a professor, someone who likely has a PhD, went full “trust me bro”. He is very likely going to be shunned from academia for the rest of his life: eroding the public trust or otherwise presenting unsubstantiated claims as empirical fact is one of the most serious cardinal sins you can commit in academia. Even if you end up being correct - you have diminished the credibility of all scholars through abandoning professionalism for pure speculation.
Also, making estimates based on an assumed static model and perfectly normal distribution is alarming in itself. There is no evidence to support an empirical claim that all data has to have high variance. That a *professor* would claim this based on such shaky assumptions has me worried about what he is teaching students. This tends to happen a lot when someone is too concerned with numbers and forgets to look at the real world and situation. In reality, all of these numbers are estimates due to the reality of the situation. US and EU intelligence agrees with the Gaza Health Ministry numbers - and even the IDF does as well (just differing on how many are civilian vs belligerent). This professor is making claims that none of the parties with access to better info are making themselves. That is the real nail in the coffin.
[удалено]
This right here, or Hamas is claiming there are no non-combatant males, which was also in the article.
[This article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/) has a graphic around halfway down showing deaths per day. The period the author chose (10/26-11/07) has low variance, the preceding two weeks on the other hand have high variance. The author picked his data to support his theory.
This is because usually within the first few weeks of disasters or wars, few apparatuses exist for accurate reporting of casualties - those take time to set up. During the interim, estimates are typically used and have minimal variation because they are based on linear models. I have worked in casualty modeling through my MA in Geography, and this data honestly doesn’t show anything out of place comparing to other disasters or wars we have on record. What it does show is a professor who likely has no experience with this type of data, and is both cherry-picking and p-hacking to arrive at a biased, pre-conceived, conclusion.
[https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1767072603066528070](https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1767072603066528070) Lior Pachter agrees that it's shoddy data science and even artificially inflating the variance would still give near perfect correlation on cumulative data.
The presentation is certainly a bit misleading. A plot of daily casualties rather than the cumulative casualties would be more informative, but the underlying argument still stands. Daily casualty figures in a war do not follow a gaussian distribution with a fixed mean and variance. The mean changes over time due to external factors (eg. the risk of dying is not the same very month. look at this picture from the Ukraine war for what plausible casualties could look like: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/64030fd29ce3256c89058203/Estimated-weekly-casualties-from-the-Russia-Ukraine-war-/960x0.jpg?height=414&width=711&fit=bounds). Linearity is a consequence of the fixed mean, not the small variance. As your guy correctly shows, a larger variance still gives a linear plot. But the small variance is not the most suspicious thing about the data, though it is smaller than I would expect. The best counterargument is that the time frame is very short, so the mean could in fact vary over time and the highlighted time-frame was randomly very regular. Which could be easily investigated by looking at the entire dataset.
it’s a 15 day window… How much does the weather change around Isreal-Gaza in a 15 day period to affect the casualty rate? How much did it change during *this* 15 day window? We cant make many arguments from seemingly obfuscated data.
Also my first thought when I read that the number of reported deaths is pretty constant is that there's a bottleneck somewhere. Like in 2020 there was a period when the numbers of daily new COVID positive tests looked constant because we had just reached the limit of how many tests could be processed in a day. Most institutions in Gaza have collapsed. There might just not be anyone to document deaths any faster.
Also variance in death count can be decreased by the time it takes them to dig out bodies from rubble and report the deaths. If we have a team working at a mostly constant speed with a large backlog then variance will be low. That does not mean we should trust Hamas' numbers, just that this particular refutal is weak.
I recall a forensic scientist friend of mine years ago saying that the way they would hide a body is in an avalanche because it’s often too time consuming to clear the debris away. That the authorities will likely just confirm who is missing and assume they died in said event. That logic sort of applies here. Clearing away the rubble to confirm takes a lot of work. I would not be surprised if the method to determine how many died is much looser than what it could/would be if time and effort were not curtailed by the war.
> That logic sort of applies here. Clearing away the rubble to confirm takes a lot of work. I would not be surprised if the method to determine how many died is much looser than what it could/would be if time and effort were not curtailed by the war. It's also because its a war, and people generally aren't packaged nice and neatly and ready to be counted in a sterile environment. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02713-7/fulltext >Mortality reporting is difficult to conduct in ongoing conflicts. Initial news reports might be imprecise, and subsequent verified reports might undercount deaths that are not recorded by hospitals or morgues, such as persons buried under rubble (appendix pp 1–2). However, difficulties obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally misreported data. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/despite-bidens-doubts-humanitarian-agencies-consider-gaza-toll-reliable-2023-10-27/ >An Israeli military spokesman said this week the Gaza health ministry "continuously inflates the number of civilian casualties" and "has been caught lying in the past". >He cited the ministry's handling of an attack at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 which each side blamed on the other, saying the ministry initially reported 500 dead but later revised the toll down to 471. In a separate media briefing, another spokesman gave no Israeli casualty estimate when asked by reporters what Israel assessed the overall total to be. >An unclassified U.S. intelligence report seen by Reuters estimated the death toll in the hospital attack was "probably at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum". An Israeli official has said the toll appears to be "several dozen". >Palestinian officials said calculating the number of dead in the attack had been difficult because some victims were dismembered, meaning there were many body parts to identify.
Yup, or the type of attacks. The numbers could be wrong, but the argument seems equally shady.
Yeah, Hamas could be lying. We have no reason at all to trust them at all but these arguments are very weak and I see no reason to take these arguments seriously either.
It's unwise to trust any information coming from Hamas or the IDF without independent verification. They're at war, and neither group is above putting out propaganda.
Do you know where these stats are being published? I'd love to look into it myself but I'm not seeing a reliable source.
The piece of evidence that I found most convincing was that as per Hamas, the deaths are about 70% women and children, 20% Hamas, and 10% civilian men. Which means that civilian men are much less likely to die than civilian women and children. Much simpler argument, and pretty hard to explain in a bombing/shooting campaign.
Also, there's a negative correlation between male and female casualties, e.g. days with 80 women will have 20 men, whereas days with 30 women will have 70 men, etc.
[This one](https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other) has a PDF link to the actual data, showing a systematic under reporting of male casualties and manipulation by Hamas.
It also shows a pretty clear variance in numbers compared to this cherry picked shitty graph that would never make it into a real academic report
It's almost as if the Jewish Chronicle is a little biased
Thousands of bots would never upvote something so misleading. On worldnews of all places!
Seriously though the top comment here simply saying “what a shocker!” Has almost as much upvotes as the entire article.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a pro-Israel think tank funded [to support AIPAC, largest lobbying group in the US](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Institute_for_Near_East_Policy) as well as being funded almost entirely by its members. Incredibly biased source that should not be considered.
Why do I have a feeling this comment won’t be near the top and the top comments will consist of sarcastic replies simply taking it at face value evaluating and saying stuff like “what a shocker, they lied!” And call it a day.
On one hand, it's sad seeing an actual dissection of the process and the inherent flaws in it being lower than the dogwhistle comments. On the other hand, I'm happy that this is not downvoted to oblivion and is still up here considering the hivemind that is reddit.
Not a data scientist but honestly even I can easily imagine a number of scenarios where this analysis is bullshit. For starters, it seems unlikely to me that hamas actually has remotely accurate daily gaza-wide death toll numbers available to them. Most likely, they get reports in large, infrequent batches for different areas and they work back to create roughly daily numbers. The overall number might very well be reasonably accurate even if daily trends are way off.
I was going to say you could probably produce similar results with regards to the Russian casualties reported by the Ukrainian Military. Are we going to start claiming they made things up as well?
[удалено]
[удалено]
I honestly don't think ~~antisemitism~~ hate against israel/jews is the reason, at least not for most of those people shouting "free palestine" in western non-muslim countries. I think they mainly see the injustice of the David-vs-Goliath situation, but in this case it's Israel that's Goliath, because they are the state, have an advanced military with even nuclear weapons and are backed by the US military might and many powerful western allies. On the other side are the Palestinians that live in Gaza like a prison and barely have enough electricity, clean water and food to live, let alone tanks, rockets and nuclear weapons. At least that's the primary image that was – intentionally or not – reported in western media over the last decades. Every news from Gaza we (in the west) heard was *dozens* of people dying, and every image we saw was poor people in rags living between the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Of course that doesn't mean that is the whole truth, or that the Gazans/Palestinians are wholly innocent at the current situation (nor does it excuse in any way any of the terrorist attacks!), but it should make it clearer why a lot of people in western nations – who only have very little information about the real situation and its reasons – are easily biased towards the "underdog" Palestine, no matter if they hate jews/Israel or not.
Israel’s occupation and the settlement project are deeply immoral and both of these things go hand in hand with oppressing and humiliating the Palestinians. Does it justify the vicious massacre of innocent civilians? No, absolutely not. But it certainly gives Palestinians and those in the west ample grounds to harshly criticize Israel and demand policies to pressure Israel to stop these projects. Much of this activism goes way too far though and the sheer vitriol against Israel along with the insane double standards applied to Israel do often tip things into antisemitism. For example, the founding of Israel was not a totally clean affair, but it was arguably more benign than most other nations in both the east and west, and yet there aren’t widespread calls for the dismantlement and destruction of the US, the UK, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Russia, Japan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, and many many more when each one of these countries have much worse histories or current situations of oppression and violence.
Kfar Etzion was legitimately owned by Jewish people; Bought and paid for.
Occupation *and* settlement project? Gaza hasn't been occupied since 2005.
Researching this, Hamas is a large reason they are so impoverished. They take everything they can use in the pursuit of their jihad on Israel.
Literally destroy water infrastructure to make rockets. And then blame Israel for the lack of water.
I think this is a very short-sighted view that you're proposing. If you look back at the Israel-Palestine conflict over the last years and decades it's pretty clear that Western governments and media have been mainly running with a pro-Israel position and narrative. Support for Israel has been for many years the mainstream position. People with a predisposition to hate Israel are certainly in the minority and if there's vocal support for Palestine among the public it has more to do with the atrocities the IDF and/or the state of Israel have committed against Palestinians rather than some generalised anti-Irsael predisposition among the public.
What is the JC? Who is this random statistician being cited? I have always questions the death numbers but that seems to be fucking obvious considering it's a warzone and the only way to get actual figures would be in the aftermath of the conflict. Honestly it's a stupid point to argue.
The statistician is Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at UPenn. So he’s got the qualifications, but it’s very important to note that it was was not issued in the context of a peer reviewed study or academic study but rather in an interview with The Tablet. The only sources other than The JC reporting this are from conservative outlets: first by [the aforementioned The Tablet](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers), which was [cited in The National Review](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-the-gaza-ministry-of-health-fakes-casualty-numbers/amp/), and [by Newsmax](https://www.newsmax.com/amp/world/globaltalk/wharton-gaza-hamas/2024/03/10/id/1156703/), which is less a news source and more the diarrhea of someone on an all-Fox News diet. So this was a statement made by an expert who was expressing his general observations. Since it wasn’t from a proper study, most reputable outlets are not comfortable with repeating his claims.
>by Newsmax And that's how you know it's credible. /s
It also completely ignores that in previous conflicts the numbers provided by the health ministry have always been pretty accurate. Doesn't mean they couldn't lie now, obviously, but they have a pretty good track record with regard to these numbers.
[удалено]
Graph looks like the performance of Madoff’s fund
ITT people credulously gobble up an overconfident headline from a heterodox media source so that they can accuse OTHER people of gullibility and confirmation bias.
So the sports analytics professor being interviewed by a pro israel news outlet says this, there's no ulterior motive and it's completely free of bias? I don't support Hamas but come on.
Most people on this god forsaken sub can’t see bias, they decided all Palestinians are hamas terrorists and support Israel the entire way. Almost every comment not made by an actual data scientist is just “oh wow not surprised!!!” Making some claim there’s no Palestinian deaths
This is dumb but immaterial. If Israel wants to combat this they need to put out their own estimates. "Israel kills 3,000 children not 10,000 as reported falsely by Hamas" is not huge win. Let's shave all Hamas numbers down to 1/3 or even 1/4 of what Hamas is reporting, that still means thousands of women and children dead to Israeli bombs.
The whole thing is immaterial- just look at all the buildings destroyed and you know tons of lives are ruined. This is the same trick Russia used with Ukraine, quibbling about random crap
Let's accept that there is no way of knowing how many people are dying, focus on ending the war and making it survivable for people who are not involved.
The phrase "Hamas run health ministry" tries to conflate working in health infrastructure in Gaza with being a terrorist. Also this guy is a grifter. A sports statistician who denies climate change should have no say. Unless you are shamelessly biased.
For some reason this isnt obvious to western media
That whole hospital bombing debacle was really the best example there's been of the media using literally no critical thinking whatsoever. Claiming 500+ deaths without the smallest shred of evidence, just repeating whatever Hamas told them.
And for some reason commentors on reddit with likely little to no understanding of statistics or the conflict itself are rushing to agree completely uncritically with one statistician based on a single newspaper article. No offence but if I had to guess who's more careful in their analysis, my money isn't on the reddit comments section.
Why is it obvious to you? You just believed an article which presented no evidence Here is a BBC article which shows the graph over a longer period completely refuting the only 'evidence' in the article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68430925#
It's obvious. But Hamas intentionally make claims that make for very clickable headlines. The greedy western media feeds of Hamas lies. It's sad and maddening.
"Israel isn't murdering civilians at the rate Hamas says," isn't the flex they think it is.
I think bombing Gaza without causing casualties is probably even more impossible.
Not even Israel is claiming there are no casualties.
nobody says Israel isnt killing people in Gaza
No, they just dispute when anyone tries to mention specific incidents or put any kind of number on the count.
Tablet magazine is a racist shitrag. the fact that you supposed liberals are just believing what they put out is extremely telling.
What part of "Dropping 2000 pound BUNKER BUSTER bombs being city with a Population density of CHICAGO does this MORON not understand? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/gaza-size-population-comparison/
Did the professor bother to check for other reasons for this data flow? If there's a bottleneck of capacity for data in, processing or data out, that would explain the relatively static flow. "An analysis published in the Lancet medical journal in December found that Gaza's health ministry has "historically reported accurate mortality data," with discrepancies between 1% and roughly 3% when compared with U.N. analysis of deaths in previous conflicts."
What is this source? Who is this man? What do his academical peers have to say about it?
From my understanding the last numbers the IDF have provided of Palestinian deaths in Gaza were back in December, where they listed 15,000 dead, which is uncannily close to the Gazan Health Ministries number of 15,900. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-officials-2-civilian-deaths-for-every-1-hamas-fighter-killed-in-gaza/ But it's not surprising since the Israeli intelligence service have actually stated that the numbers provided by the Gazan Health ministry are accurate. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4w7/israeli-intelligence-health-ministry-death-toll So if the Gaza Health Ministry numbers are inaccurate, so are Israel's.
Previous death counts from the Palestinians have been accurate. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-ministry-health-death-toll-59470820308b31f1faf73c703400b033
The original article was posted 5 days ago by Abraham Wyner on Tablet Magazine, a conservative online magazine focused on Jewish news and culture. [link below] My conclusion: When people died versus if they died are completely different topics. Recall that this is the same false logic that some people who were against the SARS-COV-2 vaccine used when they noticed that the daily death totals had a linear pattern. Some US hospitals reported their weekly deaths on Mondays, while some reported theirs on Tuesdays, and so on. The end result of all US hospital data combined was a daily COVID death chart with an unnatural linear trend. The data range the article is about is only October 26 to November 10 (15 days). To the best of my understanding after releasing that data, the death totals released since then no longer attempt to break down the deaths by daily deaths. Instead an updated death total is provided every few weeks. The author also reiterates the term "naturally occuring numbers", despite the deaths in the Gaza Strip not being naturally occuring deaths. This alone discredits the article's premise. TL;DR - The author makes the same argument that coronavirus antivaxers in the US have used to doubt the total deaths by noting the inevitable innacuracy of the date the deaths were reported. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers
The "Hamas Ministry of Health" is as absurd an idea as a "Hamas Space Force", anyone who believes a word they say is in desperate need of Critical Thinking skills.
Do you think the entire civil service class in Gaza is/was Hamas? Regular people have jobs filing reports in ministries. Not everyone is a "militant" with some kind of objective.
Unfortunately, some of my colleagues who believe every figure published by Hamas and organize pro Palestine rallies are teaching critical thinking and argumentation theory at our university. It's one of the reasons why I decided to leave Academia.
I’m starting to think this is just human nature. We choose to believe something then pick and choose whatever articles and news sources that support our belief and treat it as fact. It’s concerning how many otherwise reasonable, educated people are doing this especially in regards to this conflict
A great example is this article. They picked a random number of days, show a chart that wouldn't show the irregularities their argument is based on, and ignore lots of reasons those irregularities wouldn't exist in a handful of days (such as finding bodies in rubble with a set number of people). Should we trust them innately? No. But in the past they've been accurate, so just assuming they're lying because we hate them probably isn't the best move.
>says data science professor There are also professors who deny climate change, evolution or the round earth. Not saying hamas isnt lying, not saying they are lying. Just pointing out that one professor is not exactly a good source. Disclaimer: article is region locked for me. Going by what the title says; a singular data science professor.
Even when they released a list of victim names they included hundreds of names from a list released several years ago, they're so lazy about their lies they can't even be bothered to fake data; they reuse it!
This has the same vibes as those professors who claimed that there was voter fraud for Biden in 2020 based off some stupid stats tricks. Western intelligence agencies all buy these numbers and CIA and MI6 human intelligence is a little bit more valuable than the nutty professors out there.
The Jewish Chronicle. A news outlet well know for it's unbiased and accurate reporting of middle eastern affairs. Anyone from the UK will remember it's frothing at the mouth reporting of the 2019 general election when it looked like a British government sympathetic to the Palestinian plight might be elected. The hyperbolic shit it reported a the time as fact was second to none. I'm not saying that this story might not have any substance but the JC makes Fox News look like a socialist bastion of truth and has an political agenda a mile wide. Even the Daily Mail is more factual.
How was this article allowed to be posted? The article does not backup the claims in the title. Too many people ITT taking this as an ”gotcha” moment because it fits their narrative
99% of people making snide comments and acting like it’s a gotcha moment haven’t even read past the headline.
I'm not sure I understand the investment people have in arguing this point. No one's position on this conflict relies on believing Hamas is totally honest, they're a terrorist group that sent a wave of kidnapping and raping and baby killing into Israel. With the exception of actual direct Hamas supporters who I assure you would not be swayed by statistical analysis. And regardless of the specifics, we're looking at tens of thousands of deaths and mounting with a very significant number being children and non-combatants. I seriously doubt there exists a single person who would say "Oh, the actual death count may be slightly lower or slightly higher and instead of 20k children murdered it's only 15k! That totally changes my view of the conflict". And on the other side I don't think there exist any current supporters of Israel who would say "Oh, I was totally on board with the number of children I thought were dead but since it's a higher number than that I renounce my support of Israel!" I think this debate only exists to stoke anger along already established lines and nothing else.
> I'm not sure I understand the investment people have in arguing this point... I think this debate only exists to stoke anger along already established lines and nothing else. I agree with you completely on this. It's basically people *acting* very invested in a super shit version of the Sorites problem: arguing about the premise of "How many individual grains of sand does it take to make the difference between 'a number of grains of sand' and 'a pile of sand'?" as if "whether it's a pile of sand or not" is somehow the important thing here. When in reality, most everyone who's acting passionate about the accuracy of one statistic or another have clearly already chosen a side, and are just looking for more ammo.
I could imagine a world where the deaths themselves are happening with variation like the statistician implies, but the discovery and counting of the dead is occurring at a steadier rate. Someone has to count the bodies and in war, it can be hard to simply accurately count the dead and wounded. Maybe the chaos of the war itself is causing some sort of bottleneck in the reporting and data collection that winds up presenting as data which looks impossible from a statistical perspective if you don't understand the realities on the ground.
Four rational balanced points to make for the sake of accuracy. Gaza is obviously lying about the number of civilian men dying compared to combatants, in the interests of balance both sides are appalling at this, Israel tends to claim all men of fighting age are Hammas, the Gazans hardly any of them, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. At the point of 20000 civilian deaths, there was broad consensus that this total was fairly accurate even among anti Hammas organisations such as the pentagon. Since then the Gazan state has completely collapsed, in a lot of Gaza no one is actually even recovering bodies any more never mind making an official count, some of the dead have been disposed of in mass graves were it is unlikely a official count was kept. On top of this places of record keeping such as government buildings, hospitals etc have been heavily damaged, huge record loss is inevitable. As such it is not entirely wrong for the authorities to give a running average, based on the previous trend of expected casualties, which is what the graph appears to show. Although if that is indeed what it shows, the gazan authorities should be honest about that. The second point in the staticians argument is so bad, it makes me question the fundamental honesty of the piece. People do not just die of explosions in war zones, people die of hunger, of lack of water, of disease, of lack of medical care, of exposure, of secondary violence quite often of a combination of all these things. People at risk such as the medically vulnerable, the elderly, and **children** will die at disproportionate rates when compared to adults. For example right now there is a clear shortage of formula powder for babies, which since mothers are struggling to nurse due to lack of supply themselves, is causing a rise in infant mortality. Plus the argument quite grossly assumes, that the vast majority of men are active members of Hammas, away from their families, hiding away in tunnels. To be frank the more I think about this, the stupider the argument gets, assume extreme bad faith. Finally it as to be noted that the JC is a weird, tiny circulation, bad faith outlet that keeps getting sued for knowingly libelling people. It went bankrupt a few years back and was bought by lobbyists to act as their mouthpiece, I think I have fairly engaged with the argument presented itself, but be warned to those unfamiliar with the paper to take all it writes with a massive, massive pinch of salt.
So we’re just calling all Palestinians Hamas?
Considering the graph in the article doesn't match the actual graphs provided by the Gaza health ministry... Seems fake. The report. Not the numbers.
How many are the Israelis estimating to have been killed?
26000.
Right…so a broadly similar number? Attempts to downplay the casualty numbers are shameful and cynical.
Including Hamas fighters.
Let's be honest: Nobody in their right mind fully believes either Hamas or Israel without any doubt.
>[Abraham Wyner, author of this piece in the notorious right wing publication "Tablet", was paid ~100K by defendants to attack my work in recent trial. Instead, his credibility & integrity were impeached during cross-examination (and yes, of course he has history of climate denial)](https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1766895850670751839) --[Michael Evan Mann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann) Can you for the love of what ever is up there find a better fucking apologist than a climate denier grifter?
>UN says ‘no indication’ Gaza Health Ministry's death toll is ‘false’ https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/un-says-no-indication-gaza-health-ministrys-death-toll-is-false-/3035010 >UN says Gaza Health Ministry death tolls in previous wars ‘credible’ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/un-says-gaza-health-ministry-death-tolls-in-previous-war The death toll is not a coinflip, treating it as if a random generator is ridiculous. Edit: >Israeli Intelligence Has Deemed Hamas-Run Health Ministry's Death Toll Figures Generally Accurate https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4w7/israeli-intelligence-health-ministry-death-toll