The current death toll in Gaza is close to 42,000, but experts believe that figure is likely a gross undercount.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    The amount “civilians” in your calculations is tricky. The first time it appears it refers to dead civilians, the second time it appears to the overall civilian population (hence the 1/2 using the rule of thumb that half of Gazans are under 18).

    I.e you can’t say

    #deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #deadKids/#allCivilians

    Because #deadCivilians << #allCivilians

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.

      If I were to use your notation, I would write:

      #deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #allKids/#allCivilians

      I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.

      • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        I thought originally that you were suggesting a simple syntactic manipulation of the fraction but you’re not. I don’t understand why the equation you propose is reasonable.

        • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          Let me try to explain it another way.

          We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.

          If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.