They’re not in the war zone taking an unbiased sample.
They’re in a hospital receiving critical but patients after triage
Inherently, their statistical sample of war injuries is biased. It’s a textbook example of the survivorship statical bias!
This is all I’m trying to say: not that their observations are false or that children aren’t being shot, but that they’re not in a position to draw accurate conclusions about what goes on outside the walls of their hospitals based on information they receive inside its walls. They certainly can’t draw conclusions about the motivations of IDF soldiers from the information available to them.
This logic applies to both sides, of course, and to all similar scenarios.
A random example are the Russian claims of having destroyed ‘X’ instances of ‘Y’ weapons system when Ukraine got less than ‘X’ delivered. The reason is simple — they’re not lying — they just counted the decoys they also blew up!
It’s war. It’s messy. Information is hard to interpret.
Regarding Russia there's also the phenomenon of inflating numbers at each step of the reporting chain, so suddenly a village reached by several soldiers, who subsequently died, turns into one that, on paper, was fully occupied.
This has caused issues on the Russian side, particularly in Ukraine's Kursk offensive, because troops moved in, assuming the territory is already taken, only to be ambushed.
"....A former Israeli prime minister has accused The New York Times of “blood libel” after the newspaper issued a clarification over the publication of a photograph of a child in Gaza whom the newspaper – and other media outlets – claimed was suffering “severe malnutrition”.
The New York Times admitted an error in publishing the image after it emerged the emaciated boy had been diagnosed with pre-existing health conditions. ...."
They’re not in the war zone taking an unbiased sample.
They’re in a hospital receiving critical but patients after triage
Inherently, their statistical sample of war injuries is biased. It’s a textbook example of the survivorship statical bias!
This is all I’m trying to say: not that their observations are false or that children aren’t being shot, but that they’re not in a position to draw accurate conclusions about what goes on outside the walls of their hospitals based on information they receive inside its walls. They certainly can’t draw conclusions about the motivations of IDF soldiers from the information available to them.
This logic applies to both sides, of course, and to all similar scenarios.
A random example are the Russian claims of having destroyed ‘X’ instances of ‘Y’ weapons system when Ukraine got less than ‘X’ delivered. The reason is simple — they’re not lying — they just counted the decoys they also blew up!
It’s war. It’s messy. Information is hard to interpret.