Thanks for reading. I am sympathetic to your point here. That is, I think the “George” example is probably a bad analogy. It is misleading. However, I think it is a valid one, that is, it does not make for a formally invalid argument. My mistake is poor writing, not poor logic.

But first, I simply do not know if a particular name is connected to serial killing in a non-random way. This would have to be argued, not merely assumed. Maybe “George” (or some name) is popular in certain ethnic/age groups among which serial killers are overrepresented. The idea is not that crazy; again, people like Coulter argue that “Muhammed” is preponderant in those ethnic groups from which anti-US terrorists are typically drawn. It becomes less crazy as we are dealing with a set with very few members; just a few more or less of the name is all it would take to register in the stats. Or some other causal story might hold.

However, I will assume for the sake of argument that your point is correct—that “any pattern [between a name and propensity to serial kill] would be coincidental.”

As you see it, my analogy is flawed because it assumes the connection is not coincidental. That is, it assumes something which is not actually true. But since when can we not use counterfactual scenarios in analogies? A parent might tell a child, “Don’t steal from your sister, because—What if I stole something from you?” An analogy is drawn between the child’s stealing from his sister, and the parent’s stealing from him. It is not invalid just because it is false that the parent ever stole from the child, right? Nor is mine invalid just because it is false that Georges are non-coincidentally connected to serial killing.

The argument really breaks down as follows: Profiling for Middle Eastern men would be like profiling for Georges in a world in which this name had a non-random propensity to serially kill. This is not our world, maybe, but who cares? That doesn’t affect the logic of the argument.

Logic aside, yes, I should have picked a better analogy from a stylistic-persuasive point of view. There are too many examples of similar statistical connections which hold in the present world to make shit up. I suggested a couple of them at the end of the essay (e.g. marrying late in life as connected to suicide rates) but did not expand these as with “George.”

I don’t feel incredibly “strong” about my response here, man. I could be overlooking something. I’m not a prob-stat guy. And again, I agree with what I take to be the basic thrust or “spirit” of your point. So I don’t want to contest too much. But this is what I came up with. Also, per your last paragraph, I hope you caught that I too mentioned the effort of terrorists to work around Coulter’s profile by recruiting from other ethnic groups. I just didn’t make that the focus of my critique.

Joshua