Some things cannot be made more intelligible with data. Numbers can help tell a story, but only part of it, and often don’t get to the heart of a story. Nate Silver should know that.

As a statistician, Silver leans liberal but isn’t afraid to challenge assumptions on that side of the aisle. People accuse him of hedging too much, but Silver, who is also a poker player, would just say he deals in uncertainties.

There are, however, unambiguously certain things that are nevertheless difficult to quantify with data, the stuff of Silver’s trade. One such unquantifiable verity is the sense that something is fundamentally wrong with big cities, namely, New York City, and specifically, its crime.

That is why Silver struck a tone-deaf note when he reacted to the news of a woman being burned to death on the New York subway by pointing to the numbers. “Your risk of being murdered on the subway in a given year in New York is of roughly the same magnitude as being struck by lightning,” he insisted in his Substack newsletter. Maybe that’s true. But you also have a better chance of surviving a direct hit from a lightning bolt—somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of people do—than you do of surviving being engulfed in flames while napping on a train car. The latter is also preventable, unlike a freak act of nature.

The victim in this particular case remains unidentified. Eyewitness reports and footage of the incident paint a gruesome picture that Silver can’t quite appreciate.

The alleged killer is an illegal alien named Sebastian Zapeta-Calil who has been deported at least once before, in 2018, and subsequently crossed the border again. He had been living at a Brooklyn homeless shelter for men with substance abuse issues. The victim was fast asleep on the F train, before Zapeta-Calil apparently set her clothes on fire with a lighter. Dressed in multiple layers, she was swiftly consumed in flames, which Zapeta-Calil fanned with his shirt, according to prosecutors. He then sat on a bench and calmly watched the woman burn. No one stopped to help as she stood inside the open subway car doors and burned to death.

A lot of things stand out here. The sheer brutality and senselessness. The killer’s immigration status. The fact that he had been living in a shelter, presumably on the taxpayer’s dime. The idleness of the bystanders or their reluctance to intervene, which some are calling the “Daniel Penny effect.” Mayor Eric Adam’s insistence on qualifying his condemnation of the suspect by noting that ours “is a nation of immigrants.”

Taken together, one can’t find a better snapshot of what people voted against in November than this big city killing. Silver should understand all this, given that he consistently forecasted Donald Trump as the favorite in the presidential election. The fact that he does not suggests he suffers from certain blind spots.

I think feelings can matter as much or more than facts or what appear to be facts. Silver brings to bear data that shows millions of people use the subway system daily, and, therefore, he objects to the “notion that New York is some sort of violent urban hellscape.” Put another way, he objects to people feeling in a way that is seemingly contradicted by the numbers in front of him.

It turns out upon closer examination that the intuition of those who fear for their safety, their sense that there is a need to look over their shoulder, is right—despite people like Silver telling them they are being irrational.

Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, published an analysis of subway killings in New York in The Atlantic. He found that they are at the highest they’ve been in decades.

“Transit statistics show that other kinds of violent crime, too, have risen on a per-rider basis, leaving millions of New Yorkers worrying about whether they will be next,” Lehman wrote.

His analysis of New York Police Department data pointed in the same direction.

Citywide, he wrote, “assaults are at their highest level since at least 2006. Crimes like robbery and auto theft remain significantly elevated over their level before the pandemic.”

Silver is right that you have a decent chance of not becoming a statistic while availing yourself of the transit system. But he is wrong to dismiss concerns that stem from an entirely rational feeling of unease, a sense that the people entrusted to steward the city are largely indifferent to the plight of average New Yorkers or incapable of belaying the decay they see around them. People know it is true, and they don’t need data to tell them so.