njkayaker

There are two different/opposing perspectives. Both are correct.

Insurance is focused on populations. Individuals are focused on themselves.

The population perspective doesn't really apply very well to the individual. It's, unavoidably, an estimate and, almost certainly, wrong, individually.

wphamilton is actually a smart and reasonable poster. It seems that you two are talking past each other a bit.

Tiglath

And that, ladies and gentlemen, just about vaporizes the argument that the 14.3% probability applies to individuals. A couple of deft paragraphs result in a final devastating broadside.

Pity is that wphamilton is not listening or amenable to change. He'll sally forth again with whatever he can cut and paste that remotely offers the perception that he can hold his own.

Why is so hard for some people to say something to the effect of, "You are right, I stand corrected." It is so much better that the alternative, standing in a deep, dank, dark hole of your own making. My money is on wphamilton keeping on digging...

Tiglath

And you are certainly a kind man. I felt that way to start with but he has violated too many times the code of conduct for rational debates all educated people are acquainted with, which requires that you either provide convincing support for your claim or rebuttal for your interlocutor's, or concede the point. Going off on tangents again and again will disqualify you. Here is free for all, so instead of disqualification you get scorn.

There are two different opposite perspectives, fair enough, but that was not the question here. The question here was helmet statistics for the general population, and then we worked through the example of deaths from heart disease, AGAIN for general populations, and never for the individual. This segment of the thread has been concerned only with the population perspective. The individual perspective entered only as wphamilton switched gears trying to wiggle free of his burden of proof that the 14.3% population probability applies to individuals. Let us be clear about that much at least.

We have not talked past each other either. I have been saying basically the same you have said in your recent posts, though less incisively and with more verbiage. wphamilton claimed quite clearly that the 14.3% probability was "predictive for individual elements within the population," which is dead wrong, and I simply wanted him to support that claim. It's a clear and simple point which I repeated ad nauseam so that it could not possible go past him, as you say. What he wrote in reply did not go past me either, but since it was totally irrelevant had to be ignored.

All that is clearly preserved in the thread for anyone to see.

Be kind if you wish when people offer you bull****, but I have no time for that, and call it as I see it.

I don't know wphamilton so my opinion about him is uninformed of necessity. I am not after the man, I am after the argument. The man deserves the respect of any human being, but the argument is game.

CarinusMalmari

You know this thread, like the other helmet treads comes with a poll, right? In case of this thread a poll that suggests that about one third of the people who voted for it did change their stance on helmets at some point. And then there's of course the fact that if you follow these threads long enough, you see lots of people admit they changed their mind.


I'm sure of it, and most other primates ride their bicycles without helmets too. The bicycle helmet is a peculiarity of a couple of cycling (sub)cultures, but it most certainly isn't standard equipment of a typical cyclist.


I don't think you would even recognize things like evidence and careful reasoning is someone beat you over the head with it. You even have a lot of problems to stay consistent most times. More on that later.

It's a statistic that's completely unusable when presented without context like that. It's also a statistic from a place that is one big failure in all things cycling, so thanks, but no thinks I rather take my cue from societies that are actually successful with implementing cycling in general and cycling safety in particular. And those societies happen to prove on a daily basis that bicycle helmets are of no importance to cycling safety. That's would even be true if cycling helmets would have been 100% successful in preventing death and injuries, btw.

So you expect me to do your work for you, and that a prove to myself that cycling helmets are A-okay? That's not really how it works in discussions.

CarinusMalmari

A couple of peculiar revelations in light of all your earlier statements. You not only turn out to be "pro-death" (as you call it yourself) at times, you also admit you skip wearing your miracle safety device for idiotic reasons. Not that any Dutchie would give a **** if you opt to wear a helmet. It's a non-issue here. Btw, you really don't come across as someone who actually lived in the Netherlands.


I don't think "Holland" is the best place to ride a bicycle in the Netherlands. Amsterdam, which you earlier mentioned as about the safest place to ride a bicycle, is about as ****ty as it gets in the Netherlands. And it was a lot worse "many years ago". The rest of you understanding of Dutch traffic seems equally sketchy, and seems to be based on some "One less car" blog that portrays the Netherlands as a nation of bicycle Nazis rather than real-life experience with it.

If you look at the big picture, utility cycling is the default cycling type almost everywhere. It's a common mistake that the USAsian situation is the default, as some people assume.


The only time I saw the 13% statistic used to imply helmets cause accidents, is in that TED talk. Dutch people don't even really see bike racing and mountain biking as cycling, but as different activities altogether. Different activities that come with different rules.

njkayaker

But what does that "fact" mean?

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/download...fatalities.pdf

In 2004

CarinusMalmari

Thanks for providing the source of that "fact". On page 16 of the PDF we can read where the 97% statistic comes from and how it says exactly nothing about the effectiveness of bicycle helmets. It's not exactly contrived, but it's obviously mainly chosen because it's an impressive number not because it's a honest representation of the matter at hand, and it's consequently severely misrepresented by people like Tiglath.

wphamilton

These are rational points. In this forum I don't want to go into what insurance companies want and how they use it, for professional reasons.

But regarding general mathematics, there is a pretty common misunderstanding about the relationship of probability and statistics. Briefly, they are conceptually inverse to each other. One standard question is: Picking a set of elements from a population, what is the probability that the elements contain certain characteristics? It doesn't matter if it's an individual - it remains a probability in every mathematical sense of the word.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the actual risk for a particular individual". Perhaps, the probability of a mishap, uniquely pertaining to that individual? Inferred probability reasons from general (statistics) to the specific (pertaining to the chosen elements). In that sense, it is inductive. You never get a calculated, exact and unique number specifying that some event will occur. You get a probability that corresponds to your selection (the criteria of your selection). It absolutely does apply in an individual sense. The 14% probability applies to every person satisfying the selection criteria.

Maybe it's this needs to be stated: The probability is not a quality owned by the element. It is dependent on the selection, and applies to individual elements of the selection. Change the selection criteria, include more statistical inferences to narrow the selection, and your probability changes. Even for the same individual from a previous selection.

njkayaker

Which is another way of what I said (a few times).

The selection criteria is over-broad (often) or mismatched.

That's why the "no one uses helmets in the Netherlands, so no one anywhere else shouldn't either" argument isn't convincing.

wphamilton

Yeh, the 14% of everyone having heart failure and the 97% NY fatalities are both too broad to be useful. As I mentioned before, when you have more information you can use things like Baye's Theorem to get probabilities that are more specific.

njkayaker

Yes.

The 97% NYC fatalities statistic has other problems too.

Tiglath

Again a lot of yelling and gratuitous assertions from the MarinatedCalamari, as if he mattered. The Dutch may be certainly advanced in their cycling but they are a microscopic data point when it comes to the cycling wold, and outliers at that.

The fact, remember facts? Is that the majority of cycling is done either in cities where they mix cars and bicycles in an dangerous manner, where safety measures have been put together hastily to cope with the rapid increase in the cycling fashion, or otherwise is done as sport cycling, that is, people training in bike trails, back roads, suburban or rural settings, which has less traffic but speeds are higher.

The Dutch example for bicycles is like the Swiss example for guns. Exemplary but almost irrelevant because it involves a minuscule amount of people, doing differently what the vast rest of the world does.

So the Dutch can be referenced as an example to follow and then forgotten, because improvement it's not going to happen overnight, we have to live with the world as we find it, and cycling in the US will continue to be frequently a hair-raising experience for a long time.

Safety and legal reasons warrant wearing a helmet in the US. The very poll in this thread confirms a majority think so, so we are on the right track.

For the pro-death faction I have good and bad news: They should not be concerned that head injury is their primary danger, because people so wooden are basically a fire risk.

Tiglath

I posted previously links to the entire report on NYC cycling. Refer to that for additional information. That was a snippet of it aimed to show a particularly mouthy poster that facts require references or at least some kind of support.

See:

https://www.bikeforums.net/advocacy-s...l#post17929181

Tiglath

Overbroad or not, do you still claim that the 14% percent is predictive for individual elements within the population, or are you going to sweep that under the carpet?

Tiglath

You must mean Bayes' Theorem.

wphamilton

Indeed. Obvious enough defects to not warrant spending time addressing?

Tiglath

It's a bit late for that, isn't it? You addressed it again and again, in the wrong manner, making claims that both njkayaker and I have shown to be incorrect. In your shoes, my sense of ridicule would compel me to either come clean or at least stop pretending you have the inside track of statistics and are too mighty to let earthlings know how it is.

The fact that njkayaker is unusually charitable does not make your bold and incorrect past claims right, I hope you realize that. And changing the subject will not resolve the point you and I were discussing, no matter how hard you try.

Tiglath

This discussion of going off the rails quickly. The 14% was chosen as an EXAMPLE, to contrast the utility of such predictions for the population and the individual. Simplicity is a virtue in examples, so that the essential principle shines unadorned by ancillary considerations.

Simplicity is not a virtue in statistics that serve a practical purpose. And I never see policy based on a single broad statistic like the 14%. The report I referenced contains multiple statistics which cross-linked allowed officials to infer proper premises for final conclusions. It goes without saying that NYC government and health department do not act solely on a statistic that 1 in 7 die of heart problems. The fact that I have to point this out, tells of the point of sillines this thread is getting to, just in order to give a escape hatch to the poster who claims that the 14% is predictive for individual elements within the population.

Hey, it's no biggie. If the guy is too embarrassed to admit his error, he is certainly no exception, and if you want to give him safe passage, it's fine with me. I am just averse to seeing people trying to pass bullcrap for information.

Tiglath

You are correct, my mistake.

This one is in Florida, USA.

"Regardless of age, the failure to wear a helmet in no way precludes an injured bicyclist from pursuing a lawsuit and claiming compensation for injuries. However, insurance company adjusters may present evidence and examples in which wearing bicycle helmets have been proven to reduce head injuries. If the rider’s injury claim involves substantial medical expenses for a traumatic brain injury, the insurance company may argue this point in an attempt to negotiate a lower settlement amount."

How a Bicycle Helmet Can Affect your Personal Injury Claim

wphamilton

How clear do I have to make it, that I'm done with you? As far as your imagined competition with me goes, it's in your mind only.

I have no idea what you're on about here, and I don't want to know.

CarinusMalmari

The most obvious flaw is the fact that the data is based on 207 fatalities, of which 4 used a helmet, 118 didn't use a helmet and the helmet use of 85 is unknown. The 97% statistic is the result of omitting the 85 unknowns from the data. It's on page 16 of the PDF and it's exacerbated by people like Tiglath, who pretend the 85 unknowns didn''t exist at all.

wphamilton

Correct. Another is insufficient context: since the number of fatalities is not compared to a measure of the activities, it tells us nothing of the actual risk and therefore nothing of a reduction of risk (that is the base rate fallacy spoken of earlier). Thirdly there is nothing that demonstrates that the helmet reduced the risk, or if some other aspect of New Yorkers who don't wear helmets puts them at greater risk. We could go on from there.

CbadRider

I deleted the recent posts that went above and beyond the usual bickering in the Helmet Thread. Please don't resort to personal attacks when someone disagrees with you.

molten

I've got one for Hamilton: how about basing the decision on which bike being ridden --- depending on its speed of use. As speed of that cycle's category, affects the impact of fall. That fall is the incident to occur --- if any incident/contact with the helmet is made at all.

CarinusMalmari

Do you have a statistics on the reasons why Dutchies don't wear cycling helmets? Because I never saw those, but maybe you polled us when you "lived in Amsterdam many years ago". Anyway, I would love to see them. I strongly suspect that "Because helmets aren't effective" isn't going to be an important reason, though.

Speaking of living in Amsterdam, I'm still waiting for you to elaborate on that. Or admit to us that you never did, of course.