Help Talking-up Scotland keep going
Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going
Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421
When rtpscott replied in https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2026/09/25/drug-deaths-simple-language-not-simplistic-solutions/:
The population of England in 2026 is estimated to be approximately 58.8 million people, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.
Scotland’s population was estimated at 5,545,500 as of mid-2025 by the National Records of Scotland (NRS), marking a slow growth of less than 0.1% from the previous year
Maybe I am being stupid but using these two figures how is it that Scotland has more recorded drug deaths than England I doubt that MSM will look into that,anything to do down Scotland like this headline in the Mail.
Maybe rtpscott is being stupid? Not knowing that the figures making Scotland a drug capital are ratios, per head of population statistics? He did give me pause for thought but I quickly remembered his many previous comments suggesting he is a long way from that and it reminded me then of something that has exercised me for sometime.
To compare statistics, especially about crime, do we always need to present and to only think of their meaning in terms of the population? If you are mugged in England in a place of comparable geographic size to where you live in Scotland do you then say ‘Oh, well, it could have been worse. With all the people living here, I should expect to be mugged more often.‘ We experience life in spaces and not in population statistics, and if the same area of space has ten times the violent crime then it is ten times more dangerous in your lived experience and if someone tells you about the ratio making it no more dangerous…?
I am, I admit unsure of this and will warmly welcome debate in the comments section.
There were 77 000 violent crimes in Scotland last year and 1.34 million in England & Wales, 17 times more in crude terms.
But per head of population, with a 1 to 11.7 ratio, it’s only around twice as bad in England & Wales.
But per square mile, the ratio is only 1 to 2, violent crime is then nearly 8 times as common per square mile.
There’s something in this if feel but maybe it’s a daft thing and I know I’m opening myself up ridicule.
AI has largely dumped the above notion in its ‘trashcan’ so maybe I’m losing it? Don’t answer that question.
At going on 76, who gives a?
Some fn professor!
Update: Just back from walking the dog, no violent crime suffered, but much thinking, such as?
Dear Grok, if you walk a lot and with a friendly dog in an area where violent crime is at the national average for Scotland and thus only around half that in England on average and then do the same thing but in an English city where violent crime is 10 times the average in England how much has your risk increased for the same activity in Scotland where you live at the Scottish average.
On the arithmetic you have set up, the increase is large.You are treating the Scottish national average as about half the English national average, so:
- Scotland (where you live, at the Scottish average) = 1
- England on average = 2
- English city at 10 times the English average = 20
For the same activity — a lot of walking, with the same dog — that city is about 20 times the recorded-violence rate of your Scottish-average area.
Capiche?
Help Talking-up Scotland keep going
Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going
Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421
Discover more from Scotland's First and biggest Rebuttal Service -Talking-up Scotland
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I think you are off beam with your thoughts about how to make comparisons. We need to have some common baseline for them to have some validity. Per 1000 population is a well tried approach.
If someone has been assaulted then reducing it to a probability of 0.47% is no consolation. He or she has been 100 % banjoed. In the area where I live, there has been one murder in 52 years and very few crimes of violence have been recorded in that time. For the victims the experience was 100%. To deem the area dangerous on the basis of the experience of the victims is the fallacy of generalising from a particular.
A couple of decades ago when the concept of ‘phenomenology’ had a degree of vogue in the press and discourse. People were misusing the concept, by asserting that if someone believed something to be so, then it was so for them. Therefore it was futile to seek to persuade them otherwise. Ergo, if someone has his pocket picked in Partick, then Partick is a high crime area for them. For, me, who lived in Partick and neither experienced no witnessed crime, it is a low crime area. So, to follow the mislogic of the quasi phenomenologist it is both at the same time – a Schroedinger’s Partick. Schroedinger invented his cat to point out an absurdity within quantum mechanics. Quantum Mechanics is unsurpassed as a physics theory in its predictive power, but, it does not translate into everyday language.
LikeLiked by 1 person