During a recent real life encounter I saw something that I am almost certain is a statistical fallacy, and I am trying to find the formal name for it. As the incident involved a political topic I am filling the serial numbers off. Someone pointed out that in population P, a rather nonstandard group, subgroups a and b suffered from (high number)% frequency of untimely death and presented this as evidence that a and b were being discriminated against, without provided the base rate for population P/ the death toll for non a, non b, members of P. Can anyone help me out here?
The base rate fallacyseems like an appropriate name, but in practice it seems like that’s reserved specifically for confusing Pr[A|B] with Pr[B|A] in the way outlined in the Wikipedia article.
During a recent real life encounter I saw something that I am almost certain is a statistical fallacy, and I am trying to find the formal name for it. As the incident involved a political topic I am filling the serial numbers off. Someone pointed out that in population P, a rather nonstandard group, subgroups a and b suffered from (high number)% frequency of untimely death and presented this as evidence that a and b were being discriminated against, without provided the base rate for population P/ the death toll for non a, non b, members of P. Can anyone help me out here?
edited for grammar/clarity
The base rate fallacy seems like an appropriate name, but in practice it seems like that’s reserved specifically for confusing Pr[A|B] with Pr[B|A] in the way outlined in the Wikipedia article.
Appropriately enough, ignoring the base rate of an event is known as the base rate fallacy.