Don't tell Scalzi

April 15, 2017 9:32 PM

Redshirts Aren't Likeliest to Die — and Other 'Star Trek' Math Lessons
posted by Chrysostom (37 comments total)

Whaaa? Kirk wasn't a brash womanizer, and now this? Is it backwards Trek week?
posted by johnabbe at 10:18 PM on April 15, 2017 [7 favorites]

He knows. "If you're planning to send this to me, note a) it's been sent to me lots already, b) this is "discovered" every couple of years."
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:23 PM on April 15, 2017 [23 favorites]

Was the claim ever really that red shirts were, in general, more likely to die? My understanding of the red shirt phenomenon was simply that any time an Away Team was sent anywhere, if there was a unnamed security officer on the team, he was toast. Which is a lot more specific phenomenon than 'red shirts die lots'. Or was there also a 'red shirts die lots' rule that I'm just unaware of?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:37 PM on April 15, 2017 [11 favorites]

This just in: front-line soldiers tend to die more often than the crewmember that stays behind and operates the transporter. Laugh all you want at those silly little cartoons about O'Brien, security dude--he's laughing right back at you.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:40 PM on April 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

he's laughing right back at you.
I prefer to think O'Brien is staring into me like the abyss. Depthless and without end.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:46 PM on April 15, 2017 [20 favorites]

"Was the claim ever really that red shirts were, in general, more likely to die? My understanding of the red shirt phenomenon was simply that any time an Away Team was sent anywhere, if there was a unnamed security officer on the team, he was toast."

This was my understanding as well; it was specifically about Away Team members, where you have a limited cast for plot and budgetary reasons.
posted by Merus at 11:18 PM on April 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yes but Scalzi was specifically writing about redshirts on the Universal Union flagship Intrepid, so these numbers mean nothing for that.
posted by ckape at 11:46 PM on April 15, 2017 [5 favorites]

Laugh all you want at those silly little cartoons about O'Brien, security dude--he's laughing right back at you.

No one in all of the Federation goes through as much terrible shit as O'Brien. There is many a time I am sure that he wished for a quick death by land shark or killer robots.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 12:26 AM on April 16, 2017 [11 favorites]

This math was done a long time ago on usenet. I am surprised Noone here has a link or copy of that to share... by trying to search usenet all that I seem to keep finding is categorical links to alt.creative.startrek.erotica which... um... don't think will help with red shirt death rate caveats.

The reason yellow shirts seem to die more frequently is there are a lot of murders within starfleet at the command level - and that winds up skewing the statistics. The officers in question may not be on a command ship. Sure, once again - this may mean that it is dangerous to be am officer, I think that what was determined by this particular piece of literature was that it was unsafe to not be on a ship and be an officer.

The other thing to consider though is this: yellow shirt death toll went up with tenure. Red shirts was the entry level death toll.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:24 AM on April 16, 2017 [6 favorites]

...but there's no such thing as maths fiction ...

ORLY?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:35 AM on April 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

And yes, the redshirt thing was specific to away teams.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:36 AM on April 16, 2017

Right, and Scalzi's book was about the hapless "random [staff] members" who are faced with the presence of reality-warping "main characters" for whose narratives they are expendable fodder.

So really, the whole thing is a misconception and misunderstanding all the way down. I don't think anyone who has ever made a joke about "redshirts" actually thought that red-suited crew members were dying at a higher rate overall. The whole point was really that there were a lot of unnamed crew members, and if someone is going to die to make sure the situation is read as appropriately serious, it's going to be one of the low-ranked non-characters.
posted by Scattercat at 5:02 AM on April 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead of thin red fabric shirts, it might have helped? Light casual wear has never been terribly advisable in any situation where carrying a sidearm is also indicated.
posted by Devonian at 5:54 AM on April 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead of thin red fabric shirts, it might have helped?

Then their marksmanship would have dropped abysmally low.
posted by radwolf76 at 6:58 AM on April 16, 2017 [9 favorites]

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead[...]

Then their marksmanship would have dropped abysmally low.

I think we're on to something here. Stormtroopers, heavily armoured, have never been observed in hitting a single target.
posted by Combat Wombat at 7:12 AM on April 16, 2017 [5 favorites]

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead of thin red fabric shirts, it might have helped?

Those are made out of specialized future plot armor that dissipates phaser and disruptor fire if the wearer also happens to be a named member of the permanent crew that isn't looking to leave the ship.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:07 AM on April 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

"but there's no such thing as maths fiction"

Yeah surely Flatland qualifies?
posted by traveler_ at 8:21 AM on April 16, 2017 [8 favorites]

> ...but there's no such thing as maths fiction ...

Alex Kasman would like to have a word with you:

Do you like fiction and mathematics? Are you looking for a book or story that might be useful for the students in your math class? Are you interested in what our society thinks about mathematicians? Then you've come to the right place. This database lists over one thousand short stories, plays, novels, films, and comic books containing math or mathematicians.

I particularly recommend the sf of Norman Kagan.
posted by languagehat at 8:56 AM on April 16, 2017

Stormtroopers suck because, like so many other large entities, they want to spend zero money on training.

Also, math past a certain point can say pretty much anything you want it to say, as it becomes increasingly hard to find someone to call you on it.
posted by Samizdata at 9:25 AM on April 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah surely Flatland qualifies?

That's a documentary, not fiction
posted by mikelieman at 9:26 AM on April 16, 2017

this is "discovered" every couple of years

At least since 2013, when this article was published in Significance: Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration.
posted by effbot at 9:44 AM on April 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

That claim, in fact, is false — more "redshirts" died on-screen than any other crew type (10 gold-shirted, which are command personnel; eight blue-shirted, who are scientists; and 25 red-shirted, Grime said), but that calculation fails to take into account that there are far more redshirts on the ship to start with than any other crew type.


...and suddenly, it occurs to me that perhaps Bayes' theorem could be communicated with a short stage play.
posted by amtho at 10:13 AM on April 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Do redshirts die far more often than anyone else on the show? Yes. He even admits this.

<nerd voice>but if you look at the ratios of crew department staffing in the third party technical manual</nerd voice>

Fuck off with this.
posted by kafziel at 11:25 AM on April 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead of thin red fabric shirts, it might have helped?

Given the power of Trek handweapons, it might increase the disintegration time from .1 seconds to .15 seconds.

I mean, they have "You get hit, you don't leave a corpse behind" weapons. Physical defenses seem kind of pointless.
posted by happyroach at 11:37 AM on April 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

The reason yellow shirts seem to die more frequently is there are a lot of murders within starfleet at the command level - and that winds up skewing the statistics. The officers in question may not be on a command ship. Sure, once again - this may mean that it is dangerous to be am officer, I think that what was determined by this particular piece of literature was that it was unsafe to not be on a ship and be an officer.

The other thing to consider though is this: yellow shirt death toll went up with tenure. Red shirts was the entry level death toll.

Yeah, what's happening here is that this guy is looking at a single curated sample set after the fact, and drawing conclusions from that about statistical likelihoods. 10% of Enterprise redshirts died here, ergo, redshirts had a 10% chance of dying. It's bad math and he's a bad statistician. It's buying a winning lottery ticket and concluding that you had a 100% chance of winning the lottery. And then lecturing people about lottery odds on the basis of that conclusion.

If you Well Actually the king, you best not miss.
posted by kafziel at 11:48 AM on April 16, 2017 [8 favorites]

I think we're on to something here. Stormtroopers, heavily armoured, have never been observed in hitting a single target.

Earnest pedantry powers, ACTIVATE.
posted by mph at 11:53 AM on April 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

My understanding of the red shirt phenomenon was simply that any time an Away Team was sent anywhere, if there was a unnamed security officer on the team, he was toast.

I'm finding this is a life lesson. Every idea gets distilled to a simple nugget, then gets simplified and generalized more for people who aren't familiar with the background, then that erroneous nugget taken out of context becomes the new truth. Then every so often someone will try to point out that it's not true, but from a completely wrong direction, and there will be excited debate. The actual truth will come out occasionally too, but that's boring and will be ignored, until everyone who remembers it is gone.

I think that's called History.
posted by bongo_x at 12:36 PM on April 16, 2017 [7 favorites]

Furthermore it doesn't really matter that there are 239 "on" the Enterprise, if that number is simply drawn from a technical manual and has no relationship to what we see on the show. I.e. what matters is how many of these crewpeople we actually see on screen. What percentage of on-screen red-shirted crewpeople die? I bet it's a lot higher than 20%.
posted by crazy with stars at 1:14 PM on April 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

In Redshirts, IIRC, the Chronicles of the Intrepid was specifically an opportunistic derivative of an earlier, more successful series. Said previous show, presumably, was Star Trek. This being the case, it only makes sense that Intrepid would be playing to perceived tropes such as redshirts dying and womanizing Kirk. As the book says of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, "... it's not a very good show."

Of course, I'm probably remembering it wrong a jscalzi will be here shortly to correct me.
posted by stet at 1:20 PM on April 16, 2017

Related - a band named Game Theory performs a song that features an extended part about Star Trek with a reference to eager red shirts.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:01 PM on April 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

"Right, and Scalzi's book was about the hapless 'random [staff] members' who are faced with the presence of reality-warping 'main characters' for whose narratives they are expendable fodder."

It's a productive theme -- Patrick Ness's The Rest of Us Just Live Here is also built around this.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:19 PM on April 16, 2017

Yes, this seems to be based on "an age-old assertion" that doesn't seem to have been asserted.

Almost entirely unrelated- I used to repair IBM 3800's, and the part of the machine between the transfer station and the fuser was called the transporter unit.
Whenever there was a malfunction there, I heard a Scottish accent in my head.
posted by MtDewd at 9:37 PM on April 16, 2017

Perhaps if they wore some sort of body armour instead of thin red fabric shirts, it might have helped? Light casual wear has never been terribly advisable in any situation where carrying a sidearm is also indicated.

The exasperated thing I have said more often than any other exasperated thing I have said about Trek:

Maybe if you assholes were wearing spacesuits.
posted by brennen at 9:59 PM on April 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes, this seems to be based on "an age-old assertion" that doesn't seem to have been asserted.

What my father used to say to me was, "never go on an away mission if you're an ensign or lower."
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:33 PM on April 16, 2017

I used to co-host a podcast called The Science of Fiction. As it happens, the final episode we recorded was The Maths of Star Trek: The Original Series with James Grime, if you want to hear these facts in audio form. He's a good egg, even when we asked him to pose with a tribble.
posted by wjt at 2:42 AM on April 17, 2017

Furthermore it doesn't really matter that there are 239 "on" the Enterprise, if that number is simply drawn from a technical manual and has no relationship to what we see on the show.

This is an exceptionally good point. Red shirts could be being flushed out the airlock left and right and we'd never know a thing unless it ended up in an episode.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:01 AM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

> ...but there's no such thing as maths fiction ...

One of my favorite scifi volumes is:
Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder

with Rudy Rucker as Editor who put together a volume of different maths stories. The "Mathenauts" story in there is my favorite.

https://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Rucker/dp/0877958904
posted by aleph at 1:15 PM on April 17, 2017