Comments on: Critical Thinking as a Function of Math Literacy https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11579 Announcing appearances, publications, and analysis of questions historical, philosophical, and political by author, philosopher, and historian Richard Carrier. Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:50:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: Richard Carrier https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11579#comment-19202 Tue, 06 Dec 2016 20:00:24 +0000 http://www.richardcarrier.info/?p=11579#comment-19202 In reply to Gary Greenberg.

No, but it’s worth pointing out that the frequency is indeed by static population, and not actual total people. That’s true of the modern nation statistics as well. They are counting number of murders and the total population peak for the given year; they aren’t counting all the people who die and are born in that year. So as long as a tribe maintains a stable population of around 1000, the rate is translatably the same “per 1000” as the “per 100,000” used for nation states. That is, they are measuring the same quantity (stable population, not total persons lived and died). Or to put it another way, the method of counting you suggest is not how murder rates are calculated for nation states and modern cities; so it wouldn’t be what we’d use for tribes. We could, but we’d then have a different statistic that couldn’t be compared with the others.

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By: Gary Greenberg https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11579#comment-19053 Tue, 29 Nov 2016 19:16:22 +0000 http://www.richardcarrier.info/?p=11579#comment-19053 In the Bush tribe example, assuming 1 murder per tribe in a 100 year period and a tribe size of no more than 1000, don’t you have to account for how many total people would be in the tribe across the 100 years. Some die; other are born. The 1 murder may be among several thousand people. That would give a much lower homicide rate. No?

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