[QUOTE=you with the face]
The more you post, the more I realize that you have no experience working with biostatistical data. I’m not saying this to be mean, either.
[/QUOTE]
No offense taken, because I don’t have any experience working with biostatistical data. I don’t even feel all that unfulfilled for the lack of it.
You want to know something, though? I don’t see how pointing out the flimisiness of the data damages my position at all. After all, I already told you where to put the flimsiness of the data: in the denominator of that weighted average. You can give the limited, unstatisfying single statistical sample a nice low weight, as compared to a nice high weight for the ‘assumed equality’ you’re crediting the claimiants with. If you make the difference nice and big, like, oh, say, a factor of two-thirds of a million, then those unimpressive statistics will be almost entirely overswamped by the assumed equality, and certainly overswamped by the first persuasive piece of evidence that comes along.
Why did I pick the ratio 1:666666? Why, because those are the weights that I casually used in my statement of the equation back in post #548*.
You remember that; that’s when I came back from my brief hiatus, with the sole intent of supporting why the presence of a statistical claim that presents a difference in odds that has some nonzero credibility, when added to an assumed equality of odds, does present a difference in resulting credibility, even though it’s not enough of a difference to cause anybody to treat them differently. And I only bothered with doing that because it seemed so sad to see two or three of you going at the lone magellan01 like a pack of starving crazed weasels.
Regardless, I’ll tell you right now, I’m not convinced that a nearly 2:1 difference in prevalence in one sample means nothing. That’s a 16 percent deviation from even odds. For that to be inside your standard error from even odds, your range of error would have to be nearly a third as wide as the total possible range! That seems extreme. Therefore, what that nearly 2:1 difference tells me is not that it was twice as likely that the wow rape occured; it tells me that there is probably a trend towards more wow rapes than wob rapes. Dunno how big a trend, but ‘equally prevalent’ seems unlikely. This is not as informative as if we knew there actually was going to be a 2:1 difference in the number of wow and wob rapes this year. But it’s not nothing.
And, of course, as I mentioned before, I have already provided you a way to account for facts with a low persuasion factor: you give them a lower weight. In the weighted average. Not hard.
(I repeat myself solely to give you the chance to say that my posts are ‘content light’ again. I find it funny every time you say that.)
If there is any weight at all to the data indicating a difference in the probability of the event, you take that + the fact that increased odds -> increased credibility (I’ll get to you in a moment, DMC), and then you can pour the rest into that logic equation that DMC is ignoring:
if a < b and c = d, then a+c < b+d; which is to say, unequal credibilities.
This is of course true regardless of how huge c and d are, and how infintessimally tiny a and b are.
So, it’s not good enough for you to point out that a 2:1 in one year does not mean a 2:1 a few years later. You have to prove that it is no indication of a trend to one side at all. Otherwise it doesn’t make a lick of difference to my position.
Good luck!
(* = that’s assumming that your level of assumed credibility is 50%, which seems the be best we can sensibly assume, given that there is almost certainly another person that we know nothing about except race and gender, who would be making the exact opposite claim: the defendant.)
[QUOTE=DMC]
We both chose a set of numbers to use, both of which are accurate. You chose a subset of rape claimants that gives less credibility (in your opinion) to the black claimant. I picked a subset of rape claimants that showed the exact opposite when using your logic. Both sets of numbers are accurate. Neither tell us diddly squat about the credibility of the claimant. If they do, then you can answer the question in my post that you spent several hundred words not answering. It should be noted that using your method to determine credibility makes it quite easy to know what the result will be upfront, well before any calculations are performed. Is that why you chose the subset you happened to choose, and if not, what method did you use to pick the subset to work with?
[/QUOTE]
The method I used to choose my data was as follows: In every single example and discussion that I have presented about this topic, I have not assumed that I had the relative population data available to me. Which as you know, being the seasoned logician you are, is exactly the same as assuming that that data is not available to me.
So, when you handed me this data that I was axiomatically assumed not to have, I was in a bit of a bind. Like you or anyone else, I like to use all the data I have available to me. But I have been axiomatically assuming that that data is not available to me. I won’t let you bring in data that we are assumed not to have, and I can’t either (see, it’s fair that way) so I used only the information I had been assuming I had all along: the rate of rape occurences relative to the total population.
And that’s the sordid tale of how it happened. Any assumptions you had about about me cherry picking my data are, of course, wrong.
You do realize that I don’t give a tinker’s damn which probability turns out to be greater. You’d have to be entirely composed of cheese to think that the teeny little impact that these odds would have of the claimants credibility would stand up for one second against any direct evidence. You’d have to be genetically spawned from tomatoes to think that anybody intelligent enough to actually understand my argument (which clearly isn’t everybody) would use it to do anything but downplay the weight of these flimsy stats as compared to conventional (court-admissible) evidence. And you’d have to have a substantial number of similarities with three-week old mustard and be dishonest to try and use this as a reason to discredit somebody of any race.
So, since I obviously think myself unrelated to sandwhich fixings, why would I be arguing that a piece of information that makes a very, very, very, very weak statement about a difference in credibility between two claims, makes a difference in the credibility of the two claims (albeit a very, very, very, very weak difference)?
Because it’s effing true. No matter how many people shout otherwise.
[QUOTE=DMC]
What’s even niftier is that I can take two equally accurate pieces of information and come up with exactly the opposite results from one another. My only point is that this proves that your method of determining credibility is quite bogus.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure what you mean by equally accurate; I would be inclined to give more weight to the per-racial-population statistics, myself, if they were available. Not that your conclusion would follows from your point even if it were perfectly applicable to the situation at hand.
So anyway. So this is your “only” point, huh? That "[the fact “that [a person] can take two equally accurate pieces of information and come up with exactly the opposite results from one another] proves that [my] method of determining credibility [taking into account all available information, keeping in mind the possibly low weight of relevence that credibility has] is quite bogus.”?
If that’s your only point, you’re done. Having two pieces of information from which you can draw opposing conclusions happens all the time; if it didn’t every court case would be open-and-shut. In fact, every court case has two equally credible pieces of opposing information: the first two things you have are claim one (“He did it!”) and claim two (“I didn’t!”). According to your assertion, the mere presence of those two claims renders the entire subsequent process of truth finding “bogus”.
And do I need to explain that when two peices of information with different weights oppose one another you get something like having one train engine pulling one way on one side of a box car and two engines pulling the other way on the other side: a result of there being a pull in the direction of the more persuasive evidence but not as much as there would have been without the opposing argument? Do I need to explain that to you? No? Good. It is obvious, after all.
[QUOTE=DMC]
Not important at all. We know both the rate of white on black rape, and black rape victims in general. Choosing one over the other to get your result is no different than flipping a coin.
[/QUOTE]
Two points:
- In this argument we don’t know the rate of “black victims in general”; we are assumed not to have any information on bob rape at all. What the hell are you talking about?
and more importantly 2) You do realise that your last sentence there has nothing to do with, and is not supported by, the sentenses before it. Even if they weren’t 1) a baseless assertion, and 2) wrong, respectively. You do realise that, right?
[QUOTE=DMC]
There don’t need to be clear breaks. Some of the points on the line would be black, some would be white, and some would be grey. There are plenty of points on the line in which we’d actually all agree that we’re looking at black, white, or grey respectively. The points we all agree are black don’t become white just because you’d like for them to.
[/QUOTE]
I write you seven hundred eighty five words, slowly and carefully pointing out what I’m talking about as I would to a child, and you still manage to completely miss the point. (Hey face, guess why I find it funny when you attempt to ad hominem me by saying that my long, carefully crafted posts amount to “a whole lot of nothing”. 
)
Okay, here’s the point, O Proud, Noble Dweller of Midbuckheadtown. Let’s see if I can make this really obvious. The reason you can’t draw a big 'ole line between where the probable stops and the improbable ends, is because everything that you can think of as being ‘probable’ has a little bit of improbability in it. Grey is nothing more than black with a little white in it; ‘probable’ is nothing more than ‘certain’ with a little improbability in it.
And improbability always acts the same way.
The more of it there is, the more non-credible the assertion is.
Even if there’s only a little.
[QUOTE=DMC]
Either way, that’s a pretty shitty analogy, unless you can find someone who thinks that a white man raping a black woman is implausible. I asked you that earlier, but that also didn’t get answered. If not, then that line goes from black to very dark grey, in which case you’re going to find it hard to find a spot that anyone would consider white.
[/QUOTE]
Let’s see, did you just admit a difference as great as between black and dark grey? Yes, yes you did. Ergo you concede a little difference in the amount of white (aka the amount of inherent claim credibility) in the two claims, ergo my point is made. At least to people with the wherewithal to extract what I was talking about from my, quote, “shitty analogy”, unquote. 
) of the argument proper entirely.