Bricker is a disingenous punk.

The BBQ Pit
541

Okay.

It doesn’t. It is logical to conclude that the rate of actual rape among those who claim rape would be different, and higher than that of the general population (5 of 100).

I think I follow you here. And agree.

True. But the actual rate of actual rape among those who claim rape doesn’t matter. Since we don’t have “givens” telling us the rates of inaccuracy of the two different sub-sub-populations (black rape claimants and white rape claimants), we assume them to be equal. That’s what you do in a hypothetical with unknowns. That is why we are instructed “all other things remaiining equal”. Do you agree with that?

I disagree. Again, that would be terrific information to have. But not having it,with the information we have we are still able to come up with a best guess and a worse guess.

Apology accepted. :slight_smile:

So, you think that the hypothetical is exaclty the same whether you have this information or not?: “For every red Gorkean woman that is raped 99 blue Gorkean woman are raped.” I strongly disagree.

If a man claims that he 1) has been to Colorado and 2) he has been to the South Pole, and I add the fact that for every one person who has been to the South Pole one million have been to Colorado, are you saying that those claims are equally likely to be true? That you couldn’t make a best guess and a worse guess? If so, let’s play poker!

We address their claims as being equally credible (likley to be true) until we have information that may nudge us one way or another. Rates of inaccurate claims would be terrific and would make this question almost not interesting. The exrta nugget that we do have does, I maintain, allow us to apply some sort of comparison, piss-poor as it may be.

542

For much of the thread it was one of the givens. It is a device used to simply force an answer, nudging those reluctant to answer to choose one of the two options. The participant can still say “I don’t know, I’d have to flip a coin.”, but encourages him to do so.

It’s really no different than asking "If you had to make a best guess and a worse guess, which would be which?

543

LOL. I think a simple request for you to apply your “logic” to claimants whose names happen to correspond to people in real life is more than reasonable. You can’t do that, because well, it’s not abstract enough or something. Fair enough, I guess. But if your “logic” only works in the abstract, then perhaps it’s not logic at all. Just a thought.

How is it getting further from the heart of the problem? Have you seen the OP? I wrote it, you know. So let me tell you what the heart of the problem is. It isn’t about aliens and heart disease. It’s about finding claims of w-o-b less than fully credible, only because they aren’t reported as often as some other type of rape.

I think your problem is that you are so stuck in the abstract that you’ve become completely divorced from logic that applies in the real world. If the mere introduction of Condi Rice into the debate is enough to unhinge you, that’s a clear indication that you’re only comfortable dealing with nameless, faceless, invisible entitities who have none of the complexities of real human beings. The further we travel away from reality (I noticed that the latest crop of hypotheticals now have us on another planet, because I guess Earth isn’t abstract enough), the further away we will go from the heart of the problem identified in the OP.

If a black woman named Condi Rice claims to have been raped by a man who happens to be white, why should her claim be believed less readily than a white woman named Katy Fabre saying the same thing? In the absence of evidence and all.

You don’t have to answer this, but I felt like asking it again. Just for the hell of it.

544

Excellent.

Excellent, we’re moving right along nicely

Awesome!

Excellent. I agree. Since the black woman and the white woman are equally accurate, they are equally “offering reasonable grounds to be believed” and are therefore equally credible! QED. I’m glad we’ve finally put this one to bed.

Remember, by the way, if that desire creeps back into your mind to try to apply the general population rates to these two women that they are not of the general population, but of the population claiming rape. Since we agree that we are without the necessary information to modify an assumption regarding equal credibility, we must conclude that they remain equally credible.

Hooray! Confetti! Horns and drums! And there was much rejoicing!

545

Hentor the Barbarian,

Based on your partial and incomplete representation of my opinion I will not be dealing with you ever again. I engaged with you fully and now you play childish games. You may think your action here cute, but I find it reprehensible and the height of dishonest debate.

I would pit you, but I can’t, because I am done with you. Except for one thing:

Go fuck yourself.

546

For the final time, the abstract world is better for logical examination because it offers a world devoid of noise, bias, and assumptions that we may or may not be aware of.

This is pretty rudimentary stuff, really.

547

Ok, so we have the following:

  1. 2 people made a claim (original OP)
  2. rates of inaccuracy of these 2 people are equal (you stated this)
  3. chance of each claim being inaccurate is equal (see #2)

3 follows from 1 and 2. If you disagree, please provide math or symbolic logic showing how you arrive at a different conclusion.

When you say “but you can still have a best or worse guess” you have not provided any insight as to how you can arrive at a “best or worse guess.” It is the equivalent of saying the following:
We say:
A=1
B=2
A+B=3

and you say:
Yes A=1
Yes B=2
No A+B does not equal 3

We say: Why not?

You say: Because A+B does not equal 3

We would like to know how you can agree with statements #1 and #2 above, but not agree with statement #3. Either you need to add some additional statements prior to #3 that logically modifies #3, or you are violating logic.

548

I feel like fielding this one. The way I see it, the thought process goes like this:

First, I formalize the problem, since you didn’t (or at least not here). Axioms:

A) A black woman claims to have been raped by a white man (aka wob rape). All that we know about her is her gender, race, claim of having been raped, and her name, which is Condi Rice (which doesn’t matter, since it tells us nothing).

B) A white woman claims to have been raped by a white man (aka wow rape). All that we know about her is her gender, race, claim of having been raped, and her name, which is Katy Fabre (which doesn’t matter, since it tells us nothing).

C) In the total population of women who have been raped (by men), wow rapes are more probable than wob rapes. I don’t care how much more probable; it really doesn’t matter in the end. So we’ll say 2 out of 3 rapes on women by men are wow and the other 1/3 are wob. If you don’t like this ratio then insert whichever numbers you prefer here, real-life one, extreme ones, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

D) We don’t know squat about the rate of rape claims relative to the races, populations, actual rape rates, or anything else. I believe this is what Hentor the Barbarian wants to make sure is remembered.

and E) Any two women are to be considered to have equal ‘intrinsic’ credibility, regardless of race, absent further information. I KNOW that you with the face wants to assume this, so let’s not beat around the bush; I will assume it explicitly. However it should also be noted that whatever this equal level of assumed base crediblity is, it’s lower than 100%. (If it wasn’t, that would contradict D, after all.)

So.

Hmm, two claims: that a w-o-w rape happened, and a w-o-b rape happened. Which is more probably true/credible?

From C we know that w-o-w rapes are more common by a factor of two. This gives, say, two points of credibility to the w-o-w claim, and one point of credibility to the w-o-b claim. Or something like that.

From D we know that we don’t know anything about the relative credibilities of rape claims relative to anything. This tells us nothing, so we can’t factor it into our answer so far; what we don’t know, we don’t know. Too bad, really, since I would give this sort of statistic more weight than C alone.

From E, we know that each woman has an equal ‘base’ credibility. It’s not 100% though, so there’s still a chance they might be lying, and so we’re not, you know done. Because we have D hanging over our heads reminding us of all the things we don’t know, we will give this statistic a lot of weight relative to our totals so far. One million points to each woman’s claim – equal points for equal ‘base’ credibility.

The women are still part of the total population, regardless of their base crediblities or whatever else we don’t know about them. So, we still add in the crediblity points from C.

So, the final totals: one million and two points of credibility to Katy’s claim, and one million and one points of crediblity to Condi’s claim. Relatively speaking that’s not a heck of a lot of difference, but the difference remains; ergo it is not incorrect to say that the wow claim is the more credible of the two, based on the axioms presented. It’s just not a lot more credible.

If I left out something important or relevent, let me know.

549

Hey, I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had reached agreement. Yes, my celebration was overdone, but I intended it to be lighthearted, and I cannot conceive of why you are so upset. Your anger seems way out of line. However, since I honestly did not mean offense, I have no problem offering a heartfelt apology, especially if I misrepresented you.

If we did not come to the same understanding above, where did we diverge?

550

Look, rape itself is a relatively low frequency event. Do you guys really conclude that a woman who reports rape is automatically less credible than other women just because she reports rape? After all, the prevalence of women who reported rape is far lower than the prevalence of women who do not.

Does that construction of “credibility” even make sense?

551

Likewise, if you have a die with five sides red and one side blue, you have an 83% of landing a red. In other words, it’s more probable to get a red than a blue.

We don’t know anything about the individuals making the claims, either, which I think is a detail that keeps getting swept under the rug. If the claimant in this scenario is the Condileeza Rice, surely one can see that her credibility has squat to do with what a bunch of other women sharing her racial identity have done in the past. As much as I disagree with her politics, I seriously doubt she’d ever lie about rape. So if a bunch of black women have lied about rape, I’m not inclined to factor that into her claim, even if I didn’t know it was Rice who was the claimant. Every potential w-o-b claim could be made by someone just as credible as Rice, so it makes no sense to do that, IMO.

To assume that both claimants are equally credible means that they, as people, are equally believable, right? So why would this credibility not transfer over to their stories? Do you not see this as contradictory?

It doesn’t matter if it’s lower than 100%, though. The two claimants are *equally * credible, which means that in the absence of evidence, so are their claims.

If two women making the claims are equally believable as reporters of an alleged past event, then their stories are equally believable in the absence of evidence. The probability that any given car gets in an accident on any given day is a lot lower than the probability that any given car will require a gas fill-up on any given day. Yet when one person say they got in an car accident and another person says that they took their car to the gas station, I’m equally inclined to believe both.

Just like if a die with 5 red sides and a blue was rolled, if two people with equal credibility seperately reported that it landed on red and blue, then both claims are equally credible in the absence of evidence. There is nothing implausible about this die landing on a blue, and we don’t know which claimant is more likely to lie about the outcome of the roll.

Why does it sound like you are making this stuff up as you go along?

Do you know of any evidence showing that the more frequently an event occurs, the more likely reports of such are accurate compared to less frequently reported events? I ask, because if your hypothesis is true, there should be data out there that supports this approach to assigning credibility. I’m thinking the very fact that the justice system disallows this kind of “logic” says that perhaps this “logic” is both ethically wrong and logically wrong. I could be wrong, though. Show me.

552

I’m pretty sure when you distill this down, it becomes axiom E, which I specifically included in the argument because I knew you’d want it there. So, consider the presence of axiom E in the argument to be my response to this.

This is an important point to clarify. I do not believe that the credibility of a claimaint is perfectly transferred to their claim. Honest people can still lie; dishonest people can still tell the truth. So, even if I know the credibility of the person, I still will notice the objective odds of the truth of their claims. Example: If the most honest person I know says he saw zombie lincoln, I’m not going to assume that the emancipator stalks the earth; I’m gonna assume that for some reason or another, my friend is being less than perfectly honest in this case. In other words, a person’s credibility strongly influences, but does not entirely determine the credibility I attribute to their statements. I believe this is a reasonable thing to do, as well; it protects one from buying shares in non-existent gold mines due to the huckster selling you on his own credibility, as opposed to that of his ‘claim’.

Now, before you spontaneously combust because of the mere mention of the Great Presidential Brain-Eater in the last paragraph, let me point out that, like many things, probability is a continuum. You have your extreme probabilites, such as the odds that a zombification process exists, no-one noticed before now, and it happened to Lincoln; and you have your run-of-the-mill ordinary probabilities, such as the odds that one woman or another got raped. The thing to remember is that the difference is one of scale. If an extremely improbable claim has lessened crediblity, then so does a slightly improbably claim. The difference is simply one of scale; one dose of lessened credibility may be huge enough to end the speculation on its own, and the other might be too small to detect with normal radar. But it’s still there, which is most of what my argument here was trying to convey.

Probably because I was using vagueness about the actual odds all throughout the argument to try to drive home the fact that the actual odds were not necessary to make my point (I felt this was advisable because you seemed likely to attack anything where numbers, arbitrary or not, were given strong influential weight, as being ‘unrelated to the real world’) and because I seem to have failed totally in conveying my implied point to you in this way.

No, I don’t have any knowledge about how the fact that a claim was made effects the odds; that’s explicitly stated in axiom D. And since when does the presence of a true hypothesis imply that there’s “data” (by which I assume you mean sample or survey data) about it? That’s an unreasonable requirement. I don’t know of any survey that states that 2+2=4; does that make the claim indefensible?

And, the justice system does allow this kind of ‘logic’. You are allowed to tell the jury the odds. That’s one of the things that happens when you bring in an expert witness, isn’t it? You ask them “what then, in your best estimation, is the likelihood that the telephone exploded due to a power surge?” and they say, “I’ve never heard of it happening in my fifty years as an electrician”, and the jury nods and thinks to themself, “Well, that means it’s pretty unlikely, huh?”.

The fact that you’ve never heard them do this in a rape case about a colored person probably just implies that 1) the defense/prosecution doesn’t think that telling the jury the odds like that will help their case, since the odds aren’t exactly long, and 2) they have all sorts of other avenues of investigation to pursue instead, which we in this discussion are denied.

553

Come out of the bomb shelter much? Or is it still 1930 where you live?

554

Yep. Still 1930. Why do you ask? :rolleyes:

555

Yeah, when you got nothin’, whine about a single piece of phrasing in an argument that’s otherwise way over your head. :rolleyes:

556

But you either need to show:

  1. There is real world data that supports the assumption that frequency of events influences the accuracy of the claim of the event

or

  1. Symbolic logic or math showing that the frequency of events influences the accuracy of the claim of the event
    If you can’t show one of these things then you can’t assume that frequency of events influences the accuracy of the claim of the event because you have exactly ZERO information regarding this relationship.
557

No, it means that I just have to acknowledge that my conclusion is that much more easily overridden by other evidence. When attempting to figure out what you know, you don’t have to throw your hands into the air and give up just because you lack a piece of useful information.

558

But you’ve randomly chosen that frequency of events influences claim of event, in fact, if we looked at studies, it’s entirely possible it’s the exact reverse.

What it means is that if you do say person A is more credible than person B then you have chosen a position that is no better than randomly choosing.

559

False. Using what information you have available is better than randomly choosing. Duh.

And you’re speculating that the results of studies that we don’t have might indicate a fact that would result in a different conclusion than the known facts. That’s nice. We don’t have such studies, though, do we? For all we know, they might support the conclusions the known data indicates. They might cement the issue beyond all doubt, 100%. They might say nothing. We just don’t know. Because we don’t have them.

If we had such studies, we’d use them and be glad of it. Heck, if we had some oracle that told us with perfect accuracy wether a given claim was true, that would be even better! Should we refuse to draw a conclusion until we have have that, too?

Now, common sense tells us that the rarer the event, the more implausible claims that it occurred are. So I will assume that to be the case. Could a study trump that; turn the conclusion right around? Hell yes, if the study were at all sensibly handled. Do we have such a study available? No.

For every nonexistent study you (don’t) have that indicates the known factors indicate an incorrect conclusion, I (don’t) have an equally nonexistent study that indicates exactly the opposite. So consider your nonexistent studies nullified.

560

We have gotten no further with this than before. The original question was whether one of the claims of two people could be treated as more credible than another. To do that, you must have evidence that would describe their credibility.

If you say that their credibility is irrelevant, then you are avoiding, altering or just ignoring the original question. It makes no logical sense to say, “You two are equally credible, therefore B, you are less credible than A.”

I fully understand that, ignoring the credibility of two people altogether, you would be best served if you had to choose whether one event happened at all over another, you may as well go with the probability that the event happened at all. This is as if you had drawn the two individuals randomly from the population, or if you felt that people were perfectly incredible. But then you cannot state that one person is more credible than another. This would be true if two people hadn’t walked into your office in the first place.

So you have two specific individuals making specific claims. You sit there, and you say to them, “The probability of X happening to the average person is greater than the probability of Y happening to the average person.”

They look back at you, stunned, and say “What the fuck does that mean? I’m not the average person! What about the two of us?”

So, you say, “All I can say is: The probability of X happening to the average person is greater than the probability of Y happening to the average person.”

They say, “But how can we be the average person? The average person doesn’t make a claim of rape! Doesn’t that make it completely inappropriate to apply statistics for the average person to us, since you know we are necessarily different than the average person?”

You respond, “I’m ignoring you altogether, since I have no further information to go on, and, although I’ve already concluded you are necessarily equally credible, for some reason I feel compelled to disregard this and apply general population statistics to you. For some reason, I feel compelled to see A as more credible.”

B: “But didn’t you just say that we were equally credible?”

You: “Yes. But I’m ignoring that.”

B: “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you have a problem with B people?”

You: “Oh, no no no. I’m being perfectly logical. Don’t get all emotional!”

A: “Hey, look over there. That man just won the lottery!”

You: “No, he didn’t. Things that don’t happen more often than not just never happen.”