Or the prediction that training cops to avoid shooting blacks could make a difference to the average lifespan of blacks. This is impossible—out of 42 million blacks in the U.S., a little over 200 per year are shot to death by cops. For context that’s more than the number that die from lightning strikes, but less than the number that die from drowning.
Concretely:
200 deaths/year*(75 years/lifetime)/42 million lifetimes)*40 years lost *(365 days/years) ~= 5.2 days/lifetime, so 5 days is the average lifetime lost for black people compared to if you get rid of all police shootings and there are no other secondary effects.
Realistically getting rid of 100% of police shootings is unrealistic, but 20%-50% (or extending average black lifetimes by 1-3 days) doesn’t seem crazy to me.
I multiplied these numbers out because the dimensional analysis for yearly death rate and number of total people alive is pretty confusing unless you have an intuition for this stuff (which I at least don’t have enough of), can imagine people walking away from just the raw numbers thinking the expected per capita loss is closer to hours or closer to weeks.
Concretely:
200 deaths/year*(75 years/lifetime)/42 million lifetimes)*40 years lost *(365 days/years) ~= 5.2 days/lifetime, so 5 days is the average lifetime lost for black people compared to if you get rid of all police shootings and there are no other secondary effects.
Realistically getting rid of 100% of police shootings is unrealistic, but 20%-50% (or extending average black lifetimes by 1-3 days) doesn’t seem crazy to me.
I multiplied these numbers out because the dimensional analysis for yearly death rate and number of total people alive is pretty confusing unless you have an intuition for this stuff (which I at least don’t have enough of), can imagine people walking away from just the raw numbers thinking the expected per capita loss is closer to hours or closer to weeks.