The distinction between actions & actors is a very subtle but important idea, and it made me think about how many times I myself fall prey to the confusion. The scenario that most readily comes to mind is the discourse on killings by police in the US. I regularly cited the number of people killed (~1,000 per year on average) as *indicative* of a problem. As far as I can recall I've never offered the bare number as conclusive evidence of a problem with US policing, since 1) 1000 dead is a drop in the overall death bucket and 2) it doesn't tell us anything about which deaths were "justified". Necessarily, that one stat needs to be accompanied by other premises to shore up the overall argument.
Which dovetails into another point, which is that this post shouldn't be confused with the similar-looking phenomena involving the ecological fallacy or confounding variable problem. An example is examining the positive correlation between income & age, and then erroneously concluding this is proof of discrimination against the young. Similarly, one can examine the lopsided Palestinian casualties and erroneously conclude it's proof of animus/oppression/unfairness/etc. That seems to be a different fallacy from the distinction between actions & actors that you're describing in this post, but I can see how easily the two might get confused together.
100%. And it's totally fine to point to a big number and say "this looks bad!", but you just need to provide a justifiable reference point for "how many deaths is too many". In the case of policing, you need some sense of how perfect we can expect police to be, because it gets exponentially more expensive to reduce deaths once you get to low 4, 3, or even 2-digit numbers of people killed. Preventing if 99.999% of interactions are safe, that final 0.001% can be very difficult to address. Even then, you'd need to show that bad events are due to systemic factors or other bad policy, rather than the unfortunate luck of police officers being sourced from a population (human beings) who are routinely awful to one another.
In the case of Israel/Palestine, it's also totally fine to say "look! 11k dead!", because that's a good sign that *something* might be wrong. The secret sauce is to just look into it once noticed and come to your own conclusions.
I really appreciate this series of posts.
The distinction between actions & actors is a very subtle but important idea, and it made me think about how many times I myself fall prey to the confusion. The scenario that most readily comes to mind is the discourse on killings by police in the US. I regularly cited the number of people killed (~1,000 per year on average) as *indicative* of a problem. As far as I can recall I've never offered the bare number as conclusive evidence of a problem with US policing, since 1) 1000 dead is a drop in the overall death bucket and 2) it doesn't tell us anything about which deaths were "justified". Necessarily, that one stat needs to be accompanied by other premises to shore up the overall argument.
Which dovetails into another point, which is that this post shouldn't be confused with the similar-looking phenomena involving the ecological fallacy or confounding variable problem. An example is examining the positive correlation between income & age, and then erroneously concluding this is proof of discrimination against the young. Similarly, one can examine the lopsided Palestinian casualties and erroneously conclude it's proof of animus/oppression/unfairness/etc. That seems to be a different fallacy from the distinction between actions & actors that you're describing in this post, but I can see how easily the two might get confused together.
100%. And it's totally fine to point to a big number and say "this looks bad!", but you just need to provide a justifiable reference point for "how many deaths is too many". In the case of policing, you need some sense of how perfect we can expect police to be, because it gets exponentially more expensive to reduce deaths once you get to low 4, 3, or even 2-digit numbers of people killed. Preventing if 99.999% of interactions are safe, that final 0.001% can be very difficult to address. Even then, you'd need to show that bad events are due to systemic factors or other bad policy, rather than the unfortunate luck of police officers being sourced from a population (human beings) who are routinely awful to one another.
In the case of Israel/Palestine, it's also totally fine to say "look! 11k dead!", because that's a good sign that *something* might be wrong. The secret sauce is to just look into it once noticed and come to your own conclusions.