Naw, as then we get to do this all over again for the tenth time (It’s not as if Jean Poutine’s question was new to the discussion). If someone wants to participate, they can read back a page or two, as it’s getting a bit tiring responding to the same “one plausible/one implausible event” hypotheticals that continue to get posited.
Smack. 
No, DMC is talking about another hypothetical. As he indicated, check out the past couple of pages.
That would be wonderful information, but it is not part of the hypothetical. I still think you can maje a better guess and a worse guess. I think I’ve explained why enough to make another explanation painfully redundant.
Whew. Thanks. Enough is enough.
Onward.
I’ve read most of the posts, but I have yet to read 1 single bit of data suggesting that the accuracy of reports is influenced by frequency of events.
The only way to show that the accuracy of reports is influenced by frequency of events, is through math/logic or real-world studies.
I don’t remember a single post that has even attempted either one of these. All of the math and logic examples assumed that there is an influence.
I suggest you read all the posts. But here, the basic hypothetical is this:
Claims
White women claims she was raped by white guy.
Black women claims she was raped by white guy.
Givens
- Only one is telling the truth.
- There are many more incidences of white guys raping white women than there are of white guys raping black women
Question
With no other information whatsoever, and assuming everything else to be equal—including each woman’s credibility up to this point—can we make a better guess and a worse guess as to who is telling the truth?
I hope that helps. But as I said, onward.
It is not given that only one person is telling the truth. That was added at the same time the Ninjas and editing monkeys were. I realize it makes it easy that way, because ‘you’ can avoid having to make the tough choices and defend your position.
I mean who can argue with the Zombie Ghost of Lincoln? However ‘we’ have stated over and over what our position is and the constant moving of goal-posts and inability to answer the question when asked, tells at least me, how incredible weak and dishonest the opposing position is.
Up, up and away.
Uh…what the fuck are you talking about?
Based on that information, one isn’t more credible than the other and I don’t think you can determine who is telling the truth. It would just be picking straws.
I’m making this up but-
Claims
Woman makes $120,000 and is raped
Woman makes $50,000 and is raped
Givens
- Only one is telling the truth.
- The incidence of rape in women that make over $100,000 is remote.
Would the person making $50,000 be more believable?
I talking about this, the question I asked was quite simple, as were the terms.
80 year old woman claims she was raped.
20 year old woman claims she was raped.
Which is more credible and why?
That got modified into this:
Which you praised.
If I had to chose one, I would of course chose the 2nd scenario, but not because of statistics, but because the ability of the average 80 year old woman, to trap, subdue and rape a healthy 20 year old man, is exceptional due to the inherent difficulty of the task.
Point being, I’ve yet and still I please note, I’m not the only one who have noticed that few of you have answered the hypothetical as given, instead opting to modify it, into an ‘easy’ answer.
I don’t blame you, who would want go on record saying that due to statistics, an elderly woman, who claims to have been raped, is less credible that a hot, sexy 20 year old with firm breasts.
That difficulty doesn’t translate into interracial rape or most rapes for that matter.
I’ll ask you again.
All things being equal, which claim is more credible and why:
80 year old woman claims she was raped.
20 year old woman claims she was raped.
That’s the extent of the information.
Well, obviously, the 20 year old. See, there are fewer 80 year olds still around than there are 20 year olds. So, there’s a greater likelihood that the 80 year old who is claiming to be raped is actually dead.
And who would want to have sex with a dead 80 year old zombie? Abraham Lincoln’s zombie, that’s who.
One isn’t more credible than the other and no one claimed otherwise. You can’t determine who is telling the truth and no one claimed otherwise.
If it is a given that women who make over $100,000 are raped less than women who make $50,000, than yes it is more believable that the woman who makes $50,000 was raped. That does not mean that is what happened, or that the woman who makes $120,000 is somehow deemed not credible, it just is more likely (credible) that the $50,000 woman’s claim happened.
Saying that only one person can be telling the truth simplifies it for those of you who don’t want to see what’s right in front of your face. When put in a position where only one claim can be true, you should be more willing to use whatever you can to make an educated guess. What I find humorous is the fact that the opposing arguement to your position has been defended numerous times, yet you still fall back on the “Zombie Monkey Robot Presidents” theme as if that somehow makes your case. Again, some people went to extremes (and I do mean extremes) to try and simplify the situation for you, but you insist on being purposely obtuse by doing nothing other than accusing people of being weak and dishonest for their examples, however excessive they may be. Look at the core of the arguement, your not seeing the forest for the trees.
I don’t see how it’s weak or dishonest to hold the same position throughout this debate and doing so straightforwardly, rather quite the opposite. That’s more than can be said for consistently bitching about Lincoln throughout the arguement as though Lincoln himself was the primary focus of the arguement. But hey, whatever makes you feel better about not heeding logic and engaging in an actual conversation.
Saying that adds an unreasonable element to the original discussion. The original discussion was that the woman in North Carolina was less credible than she might be because she was a black woman claiming to be raped by a white man. The contrast was a white woman claiming to be raped by a black man. No specification that one was lying was ever stipulated, until the difficulties in defending the position started mounting for those arguing your position.
Why? Isn’t the issue more “when forced to make a guess”?
I haven’t seen it successfully defended apart from people applying modifications to the plausibility of one choice relative to another.
I see the argument in a crystal clear fashion. I’ve stated my opinion logically and rationally. Repeatedly. Yet inevitably, someone will come in with a new plausibility modification. This time, it wasn’t dead people, monkeys, ninjas or the like. It was old women raping young men. It’s really all the same.
I’ve tried logic. I’ve tried marbles. I’ve tried math. Hell, we had a guy drop by to tell us that because he could construct a Poisson model for interracial rapes, Huerta88 was right.
Please don’t pretend that I’ve just been blindly citing Dead Lincolns. I’ve been patiently and impatiently explaining that probability cannot be applied to credibility.
Here, I’ll try another example - magic marbles.
Bag of 100 marbles. 70 red, 30 blue. Probability that you will draw a red one is .7 and a blue one is .3. If you were forced to choose which one would be drawn out randomly on the next draw, you’d be smart to bet red.
However, many of these marbles have a magical capability to change their color at will. A magic red one can choose to look blue, or it may remain red, depending on its whim. The same is true for a magic blue one. We have no idea how many magical marbles there are or how often the marbles choose to appear to be an alternate color, or whether blue ones choose to look red at a rate greater than red ones choose to look blue. I could draw out two (but I’m not going to - stay with me). But if I did, say one happens to look blue and one happens to look red. I might ask you, which is more credibly representing its actual color. You might say “I know the background statistics, so the red one is more credible!” But I would counter, “That’s really silly, because you have no idea what the probability is that you have drawn magic marbles, nor the probability that a red one would choose to look blue,” and so on.
But wait, there’s more. The thing is, I have two other marbles in my hand, separate from your bag. One appears red and one appears blue. Which one of these marbles is more credibly representing its color? Now you have no idea what the distributions of a) color, b) magic or c) tendency to employ magic by color are.
Similarly in the interracial rape scenario, you may have stats about interracial rapes from one sample. You have no idea about the distribution of telling the truth about rape in the sample, nor do you have any idea how well the two new individuals match the sample you drew from in order to draw comparative conclusions.
Hentor that was seriously funny. Nice.
Dude, lighten up. It’s a running gag. It’s funny and it symbolizes what makes an implausible question…well implausible.
You see what Hentor did? He had fun with it, it made his point and still managed to tie the Zombie Ghost of Abe Lincoln with it. That’s a skill.
Had I mentioned Hitler’s brain, well that would not heeding logic…unless it was controlling a Zombie Abe Lincoln. Who was also a Ghost.
See…? Funny.
Here’s where I think you’re having a problem. You are using information not stated as a “given”. Whether these extra assumptions you are making are wrong or right is not the issue. Regardless, they muddy up the hypothetical and make it difficult to attack the problem as one of pure logic.
So, let’s recast your hypothetical so that we can’t inject other “facts” into it. Here is what you constructed:
And I’ll alter it to this:
All things being equal, which claim is more credible and why:
On the planet Gork:
A blue woman claims she was raped.
A red woman claims she was raped.
That’s the extent of the information.
As this is essentially what you posed, the answer, which I think you agree with, is that you’d have to flip a coin. You don’t have enough information to make a better guess and a worse guess.
But now I will add one—just one—specific piece of information. I tell you that according to Gork crime statistics, there is a steady bias toward blue women being raped. That for every red woman raped, 99 blue women are raped.
So we still have your hypothetical, but now with that one additional piece of information. So the question is, can you make a better guess and a worse guess? Or do you think that you are in the same boat you were before?
You’re still missing it. There is no coin to be flipped. You don’t have to choose. They both can be telling the truth or lying. The question is would you value the word of one over the other, based on her place in a statistical pool?
Apparently your answer is yes.
Again you change my question. If you wish to reframe it fine, but use the players.
Here I’ll do it for you:
I will add one—just one—specific piece of information. I tell you that according to my city’scrime statistics, there is a steady bias toward young women being raped. That for every elderly woman raped, 99 young women are raped.
An 80 year old woman walks into the station and says she was raped.
An 20 year old woman walks into the station and says she was raped.
According to your beliefs, the 80 year old is less likely to be credible.
Yes or no?
Same boat. Your hypothetical is a fair representation of the situation, although I would differ with the 99 to 1 ratio. Nevertheless…
If you say that the blue gorkette is more credible in its report than the red, I would ask you why. All you know is that the frequency in the general population differs. You go out and point at a random red gorkette, and there is a 1 in whatever chance that it was raped. But you haven’t said anything about the rate of misrepresentation between reds and blues. That is, what is the frequency of having been raped among self-identified rape victims. So if you were to say that for every 99 pairs of blue and red rape victims, only 1 red one will tell the truth, then I would agree that the report of the average blue one is more credible.
(And if sampling of rape on Gork is anything like it is here, your 99 to 1 ratio is going to vary a great deal between samples.) Are you going to stipulate that reds lie about having been raped more frequently than blue ones?
Do you understand my point?
Arrrgghhhhh. All this information would be wonderful and allow us to make a much better decision. But do you not understand the concept of a hypothetical? We’re stripping away hundreds of variables so that we are left what is a problem in logic and probability. Adding real-world observations, facts, or assumptions removes it from that clinical realm.
If you ask me why the blue Gorkette is more credible than the red I’d say it’s simply because of the statistics provided. That’s the only info I have. You could introduce one more piece of information and it could very well tip the scales the other way.
Maybe I don’t. You KEEP wanting to introduce more information. I agree the decision I am forced to make is shaky. I agree that a new piece of info could easily over ride it. But that is not the hypothetical. You don’t get to inject what we know about the real world into it. If we all start adding what we want we no longer have a hypothetical. We have a hundred of them.
[QUOTE=holmes]
You’re still missing it. There is no coin to be flipped. You don’t have to choose. They both can be telling the truth or lying. The question is would you value the word of one over the other, based on her place in a statistical pool?
The question is can you make a better guess and a worse guess. And in order to make you answer the question we’ve added, you MUST choose.
[QUOTE=holmes]
Again you change my question. If you wish to reframe it fine, but use the players.
I made your problem cleaner. It is preciselyeht question you asked without allowing you to add more “stuff” as givens. If you do not see this you do not understand logic problems and any further discussion will be a waste of both our times.
Yes. If I have to choose one, I say that the claim of the 80-year-old is less credible.
Now, would you be so kind as to answer the questions I asked a couple posts ago about the planet Gork? Thank you.