Not quite, since although it never went that far, there was a legitimate concern that I could get killed. Also, l needed to show a specific example of a bully taking the extra effort to do extra harm, and giving a real example would be, well, problematic.
TL:DR; I was talking about selection bias from you still being alive (I assume).
My point was that, given that the protagonist of Worm almost died, probabilistically, most people won’t have experienced that level of bullying, unless we include dead people in ‘people who have experienced’ because there’s a selection effect from being alive. Conditioning on survival*, probabilistically selects against more extreme torture, and towards none at all. At the limit, no one survives, and thus everyone who is alive has experienced such things with probability zero.
*For more exact numbers, look at the SSC link, and see if they investigate at a finer level that ‘was or wasn’t bullied’. Alternatively, just review the statistics and compare the rates of survival implied by this:
“In fact, the frequently bullied kids had nearly twice as much psychiatric disease, were twice as likely to attempt suicide, were twice as likely to drop out of high school, and even had double the unemployment rate. Worse physical health, worse cognitive function, less likely to get married, et cetera, et cetera.”
Also, l needed to show a specific example of a bully taking the extra effort to do extra harm, and giving a real example would be, well, problematic.
I think also that any bully who goes far enough to do something really bad gets called other things and becomes a non-central example of a bully (e.g. a bully that resorts to murder is labelled a murderer, not a bully). It seems bully often evokes images of doing mean-but-not-to-the-point-of criminal things where laws get involved and where the label on a kid shifts from bully to juvenile delinquent, even if the non-illegal things are still bad and traumatizing to victims.
Selection bias much?
Not quite, since although it never went that far, there was a legitimate concern that I could get killed. Also, l needed to show a specific example of a bully taking the extra effort to do extra harm, and giving a real example would be, well, problematic.
TL:DR; I was talking about selection bias from you still being alive (I assume).
My point was that, given that the protagonist of Worm almost died, probabilistically, most people won’t have experienced that level of bullying, unless we include dead people in ‘people who have experienced’ because there’s a selection effect from being alive. Conditioning on survival*, probabilistically selects against more extreme torture, and towards none at all. At the limit, no one survives, and thus everyone who is alive has experienced such things with probability zero.
*For more exact numbers, look at the SSC link, and see if they investigate at a finer level that ‘was or wasn’t bullied’. Alternatively, just review the statistics and compare the rates of survival implied by this:
Also, l needed to show a specific example of a bully taking the extra effort to do extra harm, and giving a real example would be, well, problematic.
I think also that any bully who goes far enough to do something really bad gets called other things and becomes a non-central example of a bully (e.g. a bully that resorts to murder is labelled a murderer, not a bully). It seems bully often evokes images of doing mean-but-not-to-the-point-of criminal things where laws get involved and where the label on a kid shifts from bully to juvenile delinquent, even if the non-illegal things are still bad and traumatizing to victims.