Why am I suddenly thinking about airplanes and rolling runways?
I don’t think someone should concede defeat if they truly feel they are right. The LW thread is proof that the loudest, most popular voices do not necessarily align with righteousness or reason.
But I do think there’s something to be said for listening. If multiple, independent parties–people who have your expertise or even exceed it–point out the same flaws in your reasoning, and all you can think to do is swap one ridiculous hypothetical with another rather than consider their criticism, then it would be wise to at least consider that you are wrong. There is no honor in stubborness for the sake of stubborness. Sometimes it’s more noble to admit that you’ve been given a lot to ponder and step away. It’s not a concession of defeat; it’s just an admission that the argument–at least from your end–has reached a stalemate.
Where?
::rubbing eyes::
Where?
More than two months after the discussion was done with and you flung your abuse at me. Yeah, you said it then.
He simply posted the same exact thing I just posted, which represents the one and only time you supposedly harped on this “all things being equal” bullshit.
Wow, you just reposted EE’s response to you, and then rather nicely informed us that we should interpret’s Huerta’s “in the absence of other evidence” disclaimer to also meaning “all other things being equal”, when there is no godly reason we should do that since he never was making comparisons between two cases. The whole time he was only talking about the Duke case. So how could that statement even apply?
Next thing you’re going to tell me is that “in the absence of other evidence” means “caveat emptor”, “contents explode under pressure”, and “restaurant not responsible for lost or stolen items.” Expect me to be just as unimpressed.
Your dishonesty is alarming to me. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
I agree that you said the word “it” multiple times, but I still only count one time that you said “all things being equal”. And the fact remains that you never referenced the importance of “codependent variables” and all that other jazz that you said that we deliberately ignored.
Can you please stop lying? Please, I beg.
Okay, I’ve figured it out. A solution that everybody can be happy with.
Firstly, to those who are arguing that the math guys are wrong, you’re wrong. The math guys are correct: if we presume a racially equal probability of a random woman claiming a false rape, and one race is represented by disproportionally few actual rapes in proportion to their percentage of the population, then the rape claims of women of that race are less likely to be true. This is TRUE FACT. Persons attacking the math and/or logic are wrong.
Secondly, and this is said before and will be said again, the arguments presented before are TRUE FACT, all other things being equal. (Or, ‘in the absence of other evidence’; same thing.) Among those equal things is the question of the relative rate of false rape reports between races. Absent other facts, the only reasonable thing to conclude is that women of equal races are equally likely to make false rape claims; ergo, the rate of rape claims is proportional to the size of the population in question. If not given further information, you have no choice but to assume this.
However, the only reason your mathemetician types are assuming this is because it’s being left unstated. It would be relatively easy to come up with some arguments for a lower rate of rape claims against white men being made by black women; it would be relatively easy to support a premise that the rate of false rape reports in a population is similar or (for the sake of argument) equal to the rate of actual rapes in a given population.
If you state that as an premise, then every math guy here will agree that (taking into account that assumption) the rape claims or black women have the same credibility as those of white women. I guarantee it. (All other other things being equal, of course.)
So now, all you people who are riding that bucking moral high horse that will not allow you to accept any conclusion that preemptively discredits one woman’s word over another, you can take your blinders off and admit that you’ve been shouting crazy-talk the entire time. Crazy talk in favor of racial equality, of course; but that’s no excuse. And no, the math types weren’t trying to be racist either. As a matter of fact they used the assumption of racial equality in making that premise assuming that women of all races are equally likely to make a false claim. (The fact that the results argues otherwise was an unavoidable conclusion, all things being equal. Heck, it took me a post and a half, in all my brialliance, to figure out what was going on, and the way I had staged my argument state outright that the two races had equal credibility only when the rate of false reporting per race matched the rate of actual rapes per race. It’s hard to think around that stated assumption of equality.)
I assume that Bricker, who seems to have started this by presenting and defending the math, was in the same boat I was at first. He said ‘all other things being equal’, and he meant it. It would be the opposition’s responsibility to point out that some of these factors could be reasonably argued for, and their effect on the math, rather than shouting and randomly lambasting, which only forces a person into a defensive position.
If you were one of those lambasting the math types, just admit you were wrong. Given the premises they were given, they came unavoidably to the conclusion they did, and absent somebody making a clear and compelling argument in favor of recognizing the rate-of-claims-=-rate-of-rapes assumption (or at least one that was loud enough to be heard over the randomness), they weren’t wrong in doing so. And now that you have no reason to blindly attack their math, since it no longer need come to a conclusion you don’t like, it might behoove you to fight your ignorance and figure out why it works, too.
I really don’t know. That was mildly amusing and occasionally informative. This is only similar in length.
WAIT! Maybe this is an example of an airplane rolling on a treadmill (with forward motion provided by power to the wheels rather than by propellors or jet engines).
I’m with you 100%.
New debate:
Does saying “absent other evidence” equate to “all things being equal”?
If all you know about two individuals is their race and gender, then you’re forced to simplify the situation by making them equal in every other way. Because you have no reason to assume they’d be different in other variables…since you have no evidence of this. So perhaps Bricker is right (in a weasley way) when he equates the two. Point for him.
However, this thinking further illustrates the limited meaningfulness of the race-based statistics being discussed in this thread and elsewhere. If we have stats showing that 60% of theft suspects are black, 40% by white, the stats don’t control for covariables such as socioeconomics and geography. If we have stats showing that 80% of rape victims are white, 20% black, again, this doesn’t take into consideration the fact that whites outnumber the black substantially. If 70% of white collar crime is committed by whites, only 30% by black, again, the stats don’t indicate the differences in socioeconomics that would increase opportunity for the former over the latter. These stats being bandied about are very superficial. A better analysis would be a multivariate approach…one that treats multiple factors simultaneously, not just one.
So by standardizing all the variables in two scenarios with the exception of race and THEN applying univariate stats that are drawn across heterogenous, highly variable populations, the conclusions you draw from your comparisons will be based on erroneous assumptions. I can’t predict how many fish I’m going to catch in the lake based solely on water depth, even if water depth–when factored in a multivariate linear model–is correlated with fish density. So if Johnny tells me he caught a bunch of fish in a shallow slough and Jenny tells me she caught a bunch in a deep slough, assuming “all other things being equal”, I have to believe both of them.
Rarely are natural phenomona predicted by a sole variable.
Look, Einstein, we’ve only gone over this already. You are a day late to this particular picnic.
As has already been stated in both this thread and the GD spin-off, to assume that each subpopulation lies about rape at the same frequency is much more of a stretch than assuming that they lie in proportion to their respective rape rates. If black women are only raped by whites 1% of the time, then that you should tell you there is some kind of sociocultural barriers that are affecting the women’s vunerability for attack. *These very same barriers more than likely also protect white men from being “attacked” by false allegations. *
So why in God’s green country would you expect both groups to lie at the same frequency? To assume that really begs the question anyway. The fact is, we don’t have any evidence that black women lie disproportantly about rape. So why does it matter what the math would say if we had that data. We don’t have it! What’s more important is that this lack of information still didn’t stop folks from being skeptical (in an absolute, non having-a-gun-to-your-head-and-forcing-you-to-make-a-choice sense of the word) about a specific claim of w-o-b rape because of its relatively low prevalence rate.
This insistence that math solves all of life’s quandries is adding as much surreality as those dragons were.
Great Og, this is STILL going on?
Here’s another theorem to ponder.
So you are admitting that you lied, correct?
I was going to go thru and cut and paste the rest of the examples where Bricker said what he said he said, but I had an insight. It won’t do any good.
I just haven’t seen someone, presented with evidence in black and white, simply deny reality with the bare-faced dishonesty that you display.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, and you very cogently explain why:
Thank you. This is, in fact, what I meant and it’s why I offer examples in post #417 of me saying one phrase as evidence that I was repeating the concept identified in the second phrase.
face: based on this discussion, I again refer you to post #417 and ask if you now agree that I advanced this line of argument more than once. I, in turn, will acknowledge I used the precise phrase “all things being equal” only once. But it’s because the phrase “no other evidence” REQUIRES THE ASSUMPTION that all other things are equal; we have no other data upon which to base any other assumption.
So - do you now agree that I advanced this line of argument more than once?
Of course. Absolutely correct. The usefulness of my predictive stat in any real-world application is effectively zero.
Yes, precisely true.
I concede that I didn’t bother slogging through untold pages of idiots making craptacular and miserable excuses for arguments against the math. Looking at the first and last few pages of the thread were enough to prove that you folks hadn’t figured out what you were doing in the meantime. I do apologise for giving all those still railing against the math the benefit of the doubt in assuming that when presented with the definitive solution to how to resolve the entire problem they have with the mathematics, that they would actually be able to recognize it and stop arguing dumbass points and ad hominem attacks. Had I known they’d already wiffed the easy way to shut the opposition down, I would have simply conceded that they were all retarded and not worth talking to. (Well, aside from that whole ‘fighting ignorance’ thing.)
Simple: nobody said otherwise, and in the glorious vaccuum of theoretical scenarios, assuming, and I quote: “all other things to be equal”, that’s what you do. Done math much?
(And no, it doesn’t beg the question. If it did, then (by definition) the conclusion would be the same as the premise, whereas in reality the conclusion that was reached is that the credibility of the rape claimants is not equal.)
The reason it’s useful to proceed with drawing conditional conclusions in the absence of hard data is because it’s a damn lot smarter than drawing no conclusions at all. As fun as it is to cruise through life on preconcieved notions and never speculate about things, there are actual benefits to mathematics, logic, and speculative thought. I mean, you’ve used a computer lately, right? Right. No speculation, no computers. It’s sort of the same thing.
And as for drawing the conclusion about the difference in credibility of the two women, that was a natural consequence of a probably incorrect premise; albeit a very reasonable and non-racist premise based in the assumption that no one race is more predisposed to lying about rape than any other. If you didn’t like the conclusion, you simply attack the premise (and NOT the person presenting the argument). When dealing with logical/mathematical arguments, attacking the premises is infinitely more effective then making fallacious attacks against a solid argument; as the opposing party, it’s your job to disprove the conclusion through a solid counterargument, not, you know, shouting and stuff. If you wanted to knock down the argument, you shouldn’t have attacked the impervious part.
Actually, since all of math is based in counting things in real life, I’ve never understood how people can be so quick to pretend that it doesn’t relate to reality. I mean, I listed everything out with frikking numbers, as head counts. Is the notion of counting people so foreign? The way so many, many people (and not just here by any means) pretend that simple math is something unrelated to reality, now that’s surreal.
They aren’t making such a low rape claim rate. Blacks are raped at a higher rate than whites, and are certainly letting it be known that they are. The numbers we worked with demonstrated that quite vividly.
No one in over 40 pages of various related threads has ever stated, implied, or even hinted at black women being 99% more honest than white women. In fact, most of us are saying that they are equally honest, while a few people, for reasons I can only imagine, are making the claim that white women are much more credible than blacks in this arena.
I think the shoe has an owner, but it doesn’t fit the folks you are pointing at.
None of your numbers have any relation to “real life”, as you put it. We are using actual numbers (except one that no one actually knows) in the thread in question, and I’ll happily repeat them here. I’ll even give both sets, the one where false rape claims come from a pool of rape claims in general, and the other where false rape claims are calculated from the general population. Feel free to use either one (hint: applying the false claims against the general population, while many of us disagree with it as accurate, will at least not stack the deck quite as far in favor of the blacks, in case you have a conclusion that you want to reach in advance).
Set 1:
2,964,000 white females
872,000 black females
1,398 actual white rape victims
790 actual black rape victims
Since there are no generally agreed upon statistics as to the frequency of false rape allegations, we’ll pick a number between the two most frequently cited extremes and go with 25%.
1,864 white women who claimed rape
1,053 black women who claimed rape
466 white women out of 1,864 were lying
263 black women out of 1,053 were lying
Set 2:
2,964,000 white females
872,000 black females
1,398 actual white rape victims
790 actual black rape victims
I went with a general population false rape claim of .02%, which, while rounded off, maps pretty well with the mean of the extremes as noted above. So, with the change to false claims coming from the general population, we have:
1,991 white women who claimed rape
964 black women who claimed rape
593 white women out of 1,991 were lying
174 black women out of 964 were lying
Have fun!
Now, really. The reason you’re only able to imagine is called ‘math’, or in specific terms, a ‘proof’. There’s no reason to get snippy. And I’ve already figured out which bubble in the wallpaper to push to make nobody racist and and everybody happy, give or take chronic inability to listen (which I concede is a powerful and overwhelming force). The trick is making the math work for you, not against you.
Curious that you assumed that that 25% of false claims was distributed the same way as the actual rapes; it makes the problem really, really simple.
466 white liars / 1860 white claimiants = 25% of white claimiants are liars (aka 75% credibility)
263 black liars / 1053 black claimiants = ~25% of black claimiants are liars (aka 75% credibility)
Ergo, they are equally credible. Which is exactly what I said would happen if you assumed that the false claims were distributed in proportion to the actual claims, as opposed to the population. I don’t have a problem with this. Do you?
The fun part about example problems is that the conclusions apply to real-life numbers too. Ergo, I don’t fear real-life numbers, and it was amusing to see you taunt me with them.
Would you like me to do the other one for you too?
Yes she did. Good going, sis.
You might not have noticed in the LW thread where I harped upon the very same problems associated with applying data based on diverse populations towards predictions about individual human behavior. Perhaps you missed all of the posts in the LW thread in which I stated that race is only correlated with the causative risk factors for rape and therefore, treating it as a determinant was a very unwise move? It seemed that you did read what I wrote but dismissed it as stupid and worthless, but maybe I was wrong? Yes? Yes, maybe I was wrong. I hope.
monstro just eloquently pointed out the absence of these disclaimers do not make your opinions anymore valid than they would be if they were present. It seems like you seem to think they do and frankly, that is what gives me the weasely vibes. As all disclaimers like that do. Like when I hear someone say “no offense, but…” I automatically know something offensive is about to come out of their mouth.
“In the absence of OTHER evidence” in particular is troublesome because it implies that racial stats count as evidence of some sort. But they don’t. And hearing this repeated over and over again…well, it just isn’t all that reassuring to me. As I hope you agree by now, if you don’t have evidence, then why make a judgment about credibility? Why not just wait until evidence is available? I don’t get the rush to attach some arbitrary estimate of credibility to a accusation without waiting to hear by sides of the story. Especially when something like race is involved.
I’m encouraged to see you say this, really. Thank you. If you had only stated something like this back in the LW thread (where the conversation was far removed from theoretical naval-gazing), this thread would not be here. As much as me and John Mace may disagree politically, he will always be a poster who I trust will keep it real when it matters the most. Because he wasn’t afraid to stand up alongside me and say WTF? when the shit was its thickest. I had hoped you’d do the same, given your profession and your past experience as a defense attorney. When you didn’t–and in fact, went against me–I got mad. Really mad. Perhaps unfairly so. So I apologize for poking you with a stick in the Girls Gone Wild thread.
It looks like a cease-fire may be in the works, gang.
Whoops; I just now actually bothered to look at the second batch of numbers (careless of me, not entirely reading for comprehension, and I apologise) and I note that in this example, there seem to actually be more lying whities that otherwise. Amusing. Fortunately, I had no preconcieved notions regarding this, other than that the problem wasn’t, and never has been, the math.
Oh, and as an unrelated note in “In the absence of other evidence”, the ‘other’ in there means “other than the stated premises”, and nothing more. It has nothing to do with the conclusion.
It’s what we’ve been saying all along. In your post earlier, you stated that the only way one could reach the conclusion that they were equally credible was to use the 99% number, and then you stated that anyone who used that number was racist. I’ll even repeat it for you
Where do you stand on that now?
I didn’t even notice this guy calling me a racist until I read your post. Something about his writing style gives me cataracts.
Now if you excuse me, I have a rally to attend and a couple of crosses to burn.
Well, if you just assert the bloody number (“Ya, whites are 99% more likely to lie than blacks, narf”) you’re still on pretty shaky ground, in my opinion. Do you see anybody around here doing that now? Or asserting that the proportion of population isn’t an important factor when you’re considering the relative honesty rates? I believe I said you had to do both to be a racist.
Basically, if you’re going around making off-the-cuff assumptions about the credibility of members of a race in general, without some sort of (oh I don’t know) proof, argument, evidence, or supportable reason to be making those assumptions, then the assumption you had best be making is that everybody is equally credible, or your position is a racist one. One way or the the other.
While some people were making some pretty wild statements earlier in the thread, (way earlier) I think that had been replaced by ad hominem by the last couple pages, and that seems to be winding down too. I think we’re past the point were people need to allegate anything about race at all, now, so it really approaches the point of mootness.