Or like when Yul Brynner blew a head pipe in Westworld. Unfortunately, encountering illogic seems to make androids, robots and computers self-destruct as often as they go haywire (see e.g. 27 episodes of Star Trek, where Kirk outwits computers and androids in such a manner).
Now you’re just encouraging me.
Please. Here’s the way to ask that question:
Remember with the Real World incidence of heart disease and no other information, this is how it really ranks and if you were honest and didn’t have an issue with the truth you would finally see the light:
Which one of these is more credible
African-American with heart disease, eating a McRib (they’re limited, so right there that tells you something!)
Caucasian with heart disease, doing poppers in a RAvE dancing to 99 love balloons
Tony Stark, the coolest cat with the heart of steel wearing his 1980 armour with the nose
THE Doctor, he has two hearts, you know.
Now I have a gun to your head, but it’s a model that’s known to jam on the third shot, but you don’t know which round I’m up to and there’s 10 million dollars in confederate money in the palor with Mr. Plum who has a wrench and statistically Mr. Plum is always in the Parlor with a wrench, unless he’s black.
Chose which one is more credible, I say dollars to donuts you chose the Blue Falcon, but not Dino-Mutt; cause we all know his story’s not worth a plug-nickel. He’s as honest, as they day’s long and will give you the cape off his back, but dude, if he tells you the Sun’s out, well let’s just say I would be looking for some owls, cause we all know dogs are color-blind.
Now be honest, tell me you don’t agree.
The idea of a perfectly fair coin is all well and good, but in practice it will be pretty much nigh unto impossible to make. The different designs of pennies versus nickels virtually assures that one of them will have a very slight statistical advantage of coming up heads than the other. It may be inintessimal but it is in the nature of things that it exists.
Very good! Yes, you are correct - my hypothetical was for shit. But here’s what I do with yours. I swipe your gun and point it at each guy. Whichever grabs his chest, I know the other was a liar.
I don’t disagree. So, let’s throw the penny in the gutter, because we both know that it is worthless anyway, right? We can illustrate the illogic of psychloan using only our nickel.
Say it’s Monday. We take our nickel and flip it 50 times. Because imperfections and oddities exist, we get heads 45 times. Now on Saturday, we flip it 1000 times, and get heads 476 times. We conclude that the probability of getting heads with this nickel is greater on Saturday than on Monday.
At least, I’m much more likely to be getting heads on Saturdays. I don’t know about you.
Or, we could go to the candy store!
No, that would not be very logical, I’d agree.
That’s right. And if you don’t understand Bayesian statistics, you really have no business claiming that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re the one who has no idea what he’s talking about.
The new information is the imbalance between black/white and white/black rapes. The Bayeseian background distribution. Background statistics matter.
You’re the one who fucked up.
But please, feel free to SHOW ME WHERE MY MATH IS WRONG.
Yes. Because background statistics matter. If you start from the assumption that background statistics don’t matter, then my conclusion will not make sense to you.
Anyway, you conceded earlier that my conclusion is correct if we assume that black and white women are equally likely to fabricate a rape accusation. Didn’t you?
Hah! Busted!Hentor the brother’s eating McRibs, he’s already dead, man! He’s been dead since like 1992. That white guy’s been’s dancing in Rave for like 8 hours to the super remixed extened Euro-version of love balloon is German, in freaking German!, You think your gun’s gonna stop his heart? Dude, Tony Stark’s in armour man, he’s wearing armour… c’mon why answer if you’re not going to take this seriously. And the Doctor, is well…the DOCTOR, you think your misfiring gun going scare him?
And you claim to write papers.
They happen all the time, but not at equal rates, so how can you then say the claims are equally credible?
The only way you can do this by believing that as long as something is possible it is equally probable. This is why I expanded the rape scenario to include men and midgets. What criteria do you use to grant that an outcome “happen[s] all the time”?
Let me ask you this. White men rape white women at different rates. You acknowledge that. Yet, in Post #202, when I introduced two other real world rape events (adding a third highly unlikely one to demonstrate range) you shrug it off as “stupid”. Why?
I ask you to look at that again. If you want to ignore the midget instance, fine. Deal with the other two. After all, men getting raped is something that happens in the real world.
Can do. Any imbalance along the lines you’ve selected is moot in terms of answering the actual question. The question isn’t about rapes it’s about the credibility of accusations.
I was asked a question about probabilities. I gave a calculation, line by line. Please show me where my calculation is incorrect.
Ya know, I just wanted to say that while we disagree about 95% of the time, I enjoy the times when I feel that you’re spot fucking on. Would you consider it credible of me to say that this is one of those times?
No. I do not get into the prevalencies of lying about rape. It is an unknown, therefore I have to assume it is equal for both. I ignore it completely. All I go on is which claim, based on real-world statistics, is more likely to be true. It’s a shitty gauge, but if that’s the only one I have and I MUST decide, then the answer is easy.
This is a good example, as it goes to incidence within the groups themselves, not merely totals. My guess wold be that they were both telling the truth. But if you further instruct me that 1) one man is lying and 2) I must choose which one, it is logical—more logical— that I choose the black man as telling the truth. Again, if we know nothing else, choosing the white guy would go against logic.
I get what you’re saying, I just think it’s a bit of cop out. Sure one can honestly say they saw the ghost of Lincoln and you can treat them as a person who’s been fooled, or are mentally ill or whatever and not make a value judgement on that person, just the story; based on out far out the story is. Fair enough.
However when it comes to something more mundane, like winning $2,000 at craps, or surviving a car crash without a seatbelt…In those types of instances I don’t see how one can doubt the credibility of the story and not doubt the credibility of the individual telling the story.
Unless you believe that the first answer to a person that claims something that isn’t in the statistical average is that they are mistaken, regardless of the claim.
Your calculation doesn’t matter. It’s calculating the wrong thing. Since it calculates the wrong thing, it’s wrong in that it doesn’t give us the correct answer.
Allow me to explain.
The question is to assign the greater credibility to the following accusations
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White women accuses white man of rape.
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Black women accuses white man of rape.
Now you can say that 1 occurs 99.9% percent of the time in a given sample and 2 occurs only.1% percent of the time, but that tells us nothing about the credibility of 1 versus 2.
Yes, but when information about the credibility of the people can be known, and therefore is assumed to be equal, it becomes about the credibility—the likelihood—of the event occurring.
Barring any other information, wouldn’t you say that a claim of an event that is more likely to occur is a more credible claim?
No. The only way you can make your conclusion correct is:
A) if you completely disregard your assumption that blacks and whites are equally honest,
B) if you assume that white men rape at random, which means 50% of the white man’s victims will be black and 50% white.
C) if you assume that conviction rates represent veracity rates. Which is perhaps the most shakiest assumption of them all. Especially if this thread is any indication of the level of thinking going on in our justice system.
D) You’d also have to assume that whites and blacks are equally likely to report rape as well.
If 25% of all rape accusations against white men are false AND 50% of all rape accusations come from black women AND only 1% of the white men convicted of rape have black victims, THEN and only then can you conclude that black women as a group are more likely to make false rape accusations than white women.
Understand this? The assumption you made contradicts your conclusion. Right away you should have seen that your answer didn’t make sense and realized where your problem was. It was in your hidden assumption about randomness. In your haste to think of the problem in terms of “all things being equal”, common sense abandoned you like a mofo.
This isn’t about math, as I’ve been known to tell Malacandra. This is about concepts that are grounded in critical thinking. If you only see these questions in terms of math, you will stumble every time.
The question is all about prevalancies though, so if you ignore them you’re ignoring the actual question.
The question is not about who is more likely to be raped by a white man the question is who is more likely to make a credible accusation about it.
Because I have absolutely positively zero, yes zero, evidence that one race is more apt to make false rape claims than another. If you have any, I’ll change my tune. Until then, I’ll be over here petting Bayes, my million dollar, vertically challenged, corn eating, male cat raping, bald eagle from the moon of Paris.
I never said that as long as something is possible it is equally probable. Hell, I even gave examples where I think that’s not the case. I simply said that unless you can show that black women falsely accuse white men of rape at a greater ratio than white women do the same, they are equally credible. The odds of a plausible occurrence happening do not speak to the odds of lying about an occurrence. The odds of lying about an occurrence actually do.
Because it is. Men are raped all of the time, and if some male says he was abused, I have no reason not to believe him. If, and only if, one were to prove that men lie more often about being raped than women, white or black, would I give it any different credibility. In other words, I don’t give a flying fuck how many stupid ways of saying the same thing you come up with, the odds of a plausible occurrence taking place will not affect the credibility of the claimant. The odds of a claimant lying about an occurrence will, but no one has shown that black women are more likely to falsely accuse white men of rape than white women are. Until then, equal credibility.
I dealt with them.
For the final time, unless you come up with a plausible situation, but one about which people are more likely to lie (hell, I gave you some), my answer will remain the same. Credibility is based on how likely they are to be lying, not on how likely it is something happened. If no one in the history of the world has ever lied about being struck by lightning, then if someone tomorrow tells me they were struck by lighting, I’ll give them just as much credibility as the guy who says his heart is beating.
Just for fun, did you want to back up psychloan’s numbers?