My answer was deleted for a bad reason

Question

My answer to this question was removed on the basis that I didn't answer the question. The question asked to address the following statement:

There is a correlation between the number of people in a country who are Muslim and the number of terrorist attacks

My answer directly addressed this by providing citations which suggest that a correlation does exist.

I also provided a US case study as a further example of correlation, which was further cited as a reason for deleting the answer, although I'm not sure why.

In this instance the moderator action is a subtraction from the quality of discourse. If they hadn't intervened and simply commented, I would have had the opportunity to address any concerns and improve my answer.

Please undelete my answer. Moderators not liking a response is not a valid reason for deletion (that's what voting is for!).

Answer 1

To address one of your concerns

If they hadn't intervened and simply commented, I would have had the opportunity to address any concerns and improve my answer.

You still have the opportunity to address the concerns, and improve your answer. The only difference is that while you're doing so, in a deleted state, you will not accumulate negative votes.

Answer 2

I've reviewed the deletion. While I disagree with the other moderator that your post does not answer the question, I think it has other big issues that you need to address before I am willing to restore it:

• None of your sources address correlation explicitly, but you conclude that "she's quite possibly right". You need to support that with a reference.

• The middle three paragraphs provide some relevant numbers about the number of terrorist attacks and number of Muslims. This is interesting, but to infer correlation from those number would be original research, which we don't allow.

In practice, both the claim and your answer seem to be faulty of cherry picking - any research in the matter must be systematic in nature, because the claim is generalized - and of false precision - without estimating the errors involved, you can't conclude that one number is greater than another with any confidence.

We expect answers to source an expert to deduce a correlation. The purpose of the site is not to perform independent research and review it, but to represent the overall current empirical knowledge on a subject.

On a personal level, I think that you can certainly improve your answer and make it a good one. Best of luck!

Answer 3

I'm disappointed that your post here suggests that the post was deleted purely because I "didn't like it", rather than directly addressing the explicit issues with the answer that were highlighted in a comment.

My answer directly addressed this by providing citations which suggest that a correlation does exist.

Your answer did not directly address this. All it did was provide citations which suggested the correlation might exist. In fact, the closest it came to a conclusion was to say "So she might be correct [...]". It was hardly a definitive response. You did not answer the question.

The strongest argument you gave was a "quick glance" (your words) at one end of the scale of terrorism and noting many of them were populous with Muslims. This is cherry picking. If the lower end of the scale also includes countries with a large number of Muslims, the correlation may be zero or negative. That section of your answer should be removed.

I also provided a US case study as a further example of correlation, which was further cited as a reason for deleting the answer, although I'm not sure why.

Using the US-only data - that US Muslims extremists were disproportionately more likely to commit a terrorist act than the general US population - is highly problematic. Not only does it not answer the question (which was about correlations between countries, not inside the USA), it suffers from the fallacy of hasty generalisation. If terrorism is committed by disenfranchised minority groups, suffering from social and political injustices, and if Muslims tend to be a disenfranchised minority group in the USA, latching onto the religion of (a disproportionate number of) terrorists and assuming that applies globally is inappropriate and inflammatory. That section of your answer should be removed, or replaced with a citation of a rigorous analysis.

Once these sections are removed, there is nothing left in the post that answers the question.

I would be happy to see this post fixed and reinstated. The requirement for a good answer here is straightforward, but at the same time I think it will be difficult to answer. We need a simple statistical analysis showing whether the correlation coefficient between a count of terrorist acts (per capita?) per country, and a count of Muslims (per capita?) per country is positive. The hard part is finding an appropriate expert who has bothered to do the calculations so they can be quoted here.