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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

I know we're not drawing from a random distribution here, but presumably, the number of environmentalists has also risen dramatically in recent years.

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How would that lead to more killings? It is not like activists come with an innate probability to be killed because of their work.

To be fair, they definitely do. Any kind of activism that campaigns against mountains of money comes with an innate probability to be killed. I suppose you could argue that it's not innate because someone else is instigating it, but if the conflict that gives rise to the murder is in itself a property of the activism...

OK, I see your point. "Innate" was a carelessly chosen word and on closer consideration a red herring. The risk of getting killed by opponents might just be inherent to protesting in a lot of places.

I believe they're arguing there's an "innate probability" for _humans_ to be murdered.

In another thread, someone argued that it might be rather caused by an increase in mining and logging activity instead (which in turn also might lead to more activists protesting this behaviour).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509378

I would expect there is. I take lot more are murdered in absolute number now than then were let's say 40k humans on planet.

The article mentions countries like South Africa, Honduras and Mexico, that have shockingly high rates of crime and murders. If you increase the population sample you will necessarily capture more incidents that are unrelated to the activism. The question is how much of it is unrelated. I think it is a fair question.

It seems they do, though. We're not talking about Extinction Rebellion people protesting outside a high school in a Western democracy, we're talking about activists working in nasty places, running interference against brutal governments and corporations. If the number of those activists is growing, then incidents of murder will be on the rise too.

That is, of course, entirely orthogonal to the actual problem being: those people out there are being murdered, this needs to be stopped, and people responsible need to be brought to justice.

Of course it wouldn't. But imagine this: you have an urn with N red and N black balls, and you draw a certain amount of balls randomly.

Then you repeat the experiment, but you have replaced a certain number of black balls with an equal amount of red balls.

Wouldn't you expect to see more red balls the second time around?

Not a rhetorical question, but genuinely interested: what is your context, given that you are aware that this is not a random distribution?

Of course the number of climate activists has risen, as we see the disastrous effacts of climate change more and more clearly and frequently on a global scale.

We also see a global political movement that has quite effectively prevented measures against climate change, using disinformation and propaganda and, as shown in the article above, deadly violence.

Why would becoming the victim of a murder be a random process?

How number of activists is linked to number of killers?

In case of rabbits and wolves, more rabbits -> more food for wolves -> more wolves.

I fail to see the link in the case of activists and killers.

It's actually not like that. More rabbits means just a bit fatter wolves and not for long. Check Google for "r/K selection".

Wolves prefer to raise better quality of offspring, not more. Rabbits on the other hand just raise more offspring and don't care much for them since food is plenty.

better fit: https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Hudson_Bay_population_cycle...

So is the number of politicians. What do you propose ?

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