Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Fraud at Fraud Factor

Lets make this quick.
FraudFactor.com is claiming Israel has experienced the equivalent of 23 September 11s.

This is done by making every Israeli death count for 60 American deaths to "adjust for scale".

The problem here is an issue of scale. If 4/5 people die in a car crash, that is not the equivalent of 80'000 September 11s when "adjusting for scale", yet using the above methodology, it is.

What annoys me here is that he is using it to push forward one side of the argument with mathematical wizardry. Ignoring important points such as that there have been more deaths in Palestine than in Israel, and that Palestinians in Palestine are an even smaller group than Israelis. (Hey does that mean every Palestinian death is worth 1.4 Israeli death? I wonder if he still uses the wizardry in that direction).

There are times when this sort of math is appropriate. In terms of economics for example, it matters more how much money each person has in a country rather than as a whole (A population of 1 million will not have the same amount of money as a country 300 times bigger). When it comes however to comparing the value of human life, it's not the same thing.

No comments: