h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Despite that, or quite possibly because of that, I think it is still incredibly important to provide sources.

Personally, what I would find even *more* interesting would be something that showed the different numbers different people have calculated -- i.e., this group says this many, this group says this....

I don't understand the numbers for Poland in WWII:

Total Deaths % Pre Military Civilian Deaths
3,600,000 17.20% 123,000 6,000,000

1. Shouldn't the figures add up?

2. Is the 6,000,000 referring to the number of Jews murdered in concentration camps?

If so, maybe you should consider adding an extra row for persecuted people, like Gypsies and Jews. Not all of them were Polish.

HELL

hello?

Mickey - I know Ben's very busy in her personal life at the moment, but the lsat time we spoke this entry hadn't been forgotten. So if you could leave it out of the current spring cleaning I'm sure it would be appreciated...

Z

Oh, don't worry, my spring cleaning is done now -- I just ended up going through quite a bit more entries than usual before finding my picks for this month.

You don't say.

Whatever works for y'all.

I am happy to spend an hour or so putting in a few more caveats, and driving home the point that reading statistics requires as much alertness and skill as compiling them, but I am not going to go out and do more research.

If the mood of the meeting is that it would require more than that, then pull it out now. If it would be pickable after the tidying up, then I'll tidy it up and we can leave it here.

B

What I had asked for was sources -- as assumedly sources were involved in the original research for the entry, I would think/hope that simply stating what the sources for the numbers were wouldn't require that much in the way of extensive additional research.


Mikey

Good point Mikey. I have added a list of different tables of stats which are available online, stating which ones I used. In the course of googling for them I found some other useful commentary sites, which I have added too.

Does that cover it?

Ben

I think that's a big help.

A couple of other things that I personally think would be worth pointing out:

In the second table, it looks as if there were 0 civilian deaths among Americans due to WW2, when this is quite obviously not the case -- the estimates I've seen have ranged from 3K - 10K, I believe.

What you're not saying here, and perhaps assuming that readers will already know, is why it's so insanely difficult to come up with these numbers with any accuracy. I know that working with my students, I have an incredibly hard time getting them to grasp why it is we can be so unsure as to whether 20 million Russians died or 30 million. And that it's not necessarily any easier in the wars of today -- it's pretty clear from the news that no one is going to agree any century soon on how many Iraqi civilians have died.

Clearly, this is something people can (and have) written entire books on -- all I really think is needed here is 2 or 3 sentences.

It may be also worth adding in a sentence mentioning how the time involved varied so much from country to country -- i.e., WWII for some countries was a decade long affair, and for others it wasn't even 2 years. I think I've seen a graph somewhere that showed how the mortality rate for one of the countries (either Germany or Russia) changed over the course of the war -- it was incredibly illuminating. I'll post a link here if I can find it.

Do you know if (for WW1, especially) the military deaths figures include deaths due to infection among the military? It's just another thing that might be worth a simple sentence -- just that for some countries, military mortality due to infectious diseases actually exceeded battle mortality.

I don't think any of this should require extra research, though -- just a matter of adding an extra sentence here and there.

All good points Mikey, and ones that I will take on board because they will help make an adequate entry into a better one. The site that I admire the most in all of this is the one which I link to twice. Now there is a guy who tears stats apart into tiny little pieces and looks to see what he has got.

There are so many interesting things alluded to here. One of the sites I saw tonight (I forget which, and I may not have bookmarked it) had the US WWII dates as being from 1941-1947. The Guardian's inaccuracy which I mention in the links is also unnerving. Presumably it was a result of a researcher misreading some stats, but the Guardian is a respected broadsheet newspaper in the UK, and really should not make those mistakes. Unfortunately most journalists excelled in English and flunked Maths. That is more than unfortunate, actually, it means that most of them lack the most basic abilities to evaluate data.

I'll come back to it in a few days. Mind you - my objective is not to point out all of the inconsistancies and anomolies, but to point out that such things exist and encourage people to think for themselves about stats. For example I allude to the fact that the stats in the table are for combat deaths and the stats in the table which gives considerably higher US deaths are for "killed and died". I am reluctant to join up too many of the dots. As I said - I want people to think and the more of that I do for them the less they will do for themselves.

Thanks for prodding me into doing something about this.

B

Interesting stuff this figures business isn't it? Although after a while, I always feel it's a bit un, getting into a pissing match about which country suffered the most at which time in history. I mean, after a couple of million dead...

Anyway, I think there's something funny about the number for the pre war Jewish population. Is the comma in the wrong place?

I've refrained from comment about this Entry until now, though I read it early.

I was and still am very unsure about the value it brings. A reader needs a terrible imagination to assimilate these figures.

Readers with the requisite imagination were probably aware enough without the Entry. Readers without the imagination will not understand, not this way anyway. Instead, they will conduct a grotesque debate in threads like this one.

This is the Pain of our Race, isn't it? Please don't diminish the humanity of every soul taken in the turmoil of our past. Please don't pore over all of this as if it's some technical curiosity. Above all, please don't perpetuate the clever and cold mindset that makes atrocity possible.

Oh, dammit, I wonder if you are right, Pin.

This started off as an attempt to lay to rest the age old argument that the US 'rescued' Europe in WWI and WWII. In WWI they didn't, simple as that, and in WWII they probably shortened it but it was the USSR who won it.

Then I started showing people that statistics are more interesting if you ask questions about them. And now it is shifting into a demonstration of statistical falliability, which trivialises the whole thing.

However...

Thought one: The numbers of dead in the two World Wars is a valid subject for a guide entry. Especially given how difficult it is to find the figures.

Thought two: Any entry which gives any figures at all should probably cite all the figures that the author finds availble. It would, in my opinion, be irresponsible not to. (Thanks, Mikey).

Thought three: I think that discussing the differences between the figures available is - as Mikey has said - also important.

Mind you, I now wonder whether I should take a different approach and highlight the anomolies and differences *without comment*. I prefer to leave people with that uncomfortable thinking feeling.

Pin, I really do take your point that this data should not be used as a working example in an entry about statistics. However I think that any entry about the War Dead needs to acknowledge the fundamental problems with the different statistics.

The entry I would like to write is actually the Matthew White site, but I am too lazy and he has already done it.

*thinks*

Sol, you are right, there is an extra zero. I'll remove it next time I am a girl called Ben.

B

Shocking entry, Ben

Just adding my thoughts - my father was one of those wounded soldiers, he was in the Lancashire regiment, now a Normandy Vet.
He was there for the 60th D-Day commemorations last weekend.

He was blown up by a mortar bomb and shot at the same time. The bullet entered his hip and ended up in his lung. It's too deeply embedded to be removed.

He survived {obviously} fathered 4 {surviving} children and enjoyed 63 years of marriage to my mother.

This is an excellent entry for the Guide, IMHO. Well done, Ben

It should serve as a reminder of the horrors of war, all those young lives ended before they'd even had a chance to live..

AGB

Hello, and sorry to nag again...

But I still have a problem with the 6 million civilian deaths in the table for Poland. Not all Jews were Polish. I know, you mention in the text, a) that you took the figures from the cited table and b) that you're not sure about this specific number in the table.

It is obvious, to me at least, that the 6M in the table are the number of mudered Jews. All other rows in that table add up, this is the only odd one. I don't want to start a discussion around how many of the 6M were Jews, but let us agree it's the vast majority...

On the other hand, the Jews were not a combattant nation, and these casualties (the 6M) would have to be included in every number of civilian deaths for every country... OK. The exact numbers are of course difficult to obtain, right? Also you would have to redo a lot of the table... Suggestion: Why not include, directly, a row 'Victims of Nazi-persecution' at the end of the table and make the numbers for Poland add up?

I also don't like the sentence 'Interesting isn't it?' at the end of the Entry... but I think that is my personal taste, to me it sounds like 'funny, no?'

As said, this might seem to be a minor point, but to me this is important... In the way it stands, it could be interpreted like the persecution of Jews was a special problem restricted to Poland.

Or do you think am I being oversensitive?

Oh BTW, I think this is a very important Entry for the Guide.

HELL

Since I have no access to the sources, there is absolutely no way I am going to tamper with the figures. Not now, not ever. I am sorry, because this is something that you feel strongly about, but I am simply not prepared to make those sorts of assumptions about the data.

However, I *am* going to take a look at all the tables of statistics I have found and will probably choose different tables to present, preferably ones which present similar categories for the two wars, (eg 'killed' /'killed' or 'dead' / 'dead' not 'dead' / 'killed and died').

What I am not looking forward is having to re-code the tables. I know I should get a wysiwyg html editor, but I am too lazy for that.

B

Hell, I am sorry, it is a perfect example of think before you post. Checking the table I copied, (which is listed in the links at the bottom), I see I made a typo.

B