Data Science Vs Hamas Math - with Abraham Wyner

Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Ark Media

Society, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Israel, News Commentary, News, Politics, Elections, Palestine, Dan Senor, Government

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

30,000. You hear that number and you already know exactly what we are referring to. It’s 30,000 casualties. That’s the number of Palestinians that have been killed in Gaza as a result of the IDF response to the October 7th invasion of Israel, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Of course, we don’t know how the Gaza Health Ministry arrived at that number. How does it collect this data, analyze it, and how does it account for civilian casualties versus Hamas terrorists? It’s a big round number that everyone - from news reporters, to aid organizations to governments - mindlessly repeat. Well, a data scientist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has taken the time to try to understand how these numbers are computed. He published his study in a piece in Tablet Magazine — it’s called “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”. You can find it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers Abraham Wyner is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative. Professor Wyner received his Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics from Yale University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with distinction in his major. He was the recipient of the Stanley Prize for excellence in Mathematics. His PhD in Statistics is from Stanford University.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you just take Hamas's number of casualties, 30,000, and call them all civilians, or almost all civilians,
0:06.6	then you're looking at an extreme imbalance of civilians to fighters, and that's the public perception.
0:12.3	If you just take Hamas's number, 6,000, you still have
0:16.2	what we call the missing men problem. You either have essentially no civilian men dying or the idea that all civilian men are Hamas and neither
0:25.2	those are true. So to start with without even doing an analysis of looking at the
0:30.0	data you've got a problem. 30,000.
0:35.0	30,000.
0:41.0	30,000.
0:42.0	You hear that number and you already know exactly what I'm referring to. It's 30,000
0:47.2	casualties. That's the number of Palestinians that have been killed in Gaza as a result of the IDF response to the October 7th
0:55.1	invasion of Israel.
0:57.2	So we're told.
0:58.2	Of course, we don't know how the Gaza Ministry of Health has arrived at that 30,000 number? How does the
1:06.4	Health Ministry collect this data? Analyze it. How does it account for
1:10.7	civilian casualties versus Hamas terrorists?
1:14.0	30,000 is a big round number that everyone from news reporters to aid organizations
1:18.7	to governments mindlessly repeat.
1:21.8	And I say mindlessly because it also accounts for 13,000 Hamas terrorists
1:27.2	that have been killed. And while the remaining 17,000 civilian deaths, are extremely tragic.
1:33.8	A ratio of 1 to 1.4, especially in a battlefield designed to optimize the number of
1:40.0	civilian deaths by Hamas is actually much lower than other counter-insurgency
1:45.6	wars of this kind throughout history. Now we have been skeptical of both the
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