Actually it was her story itself that cast doubt on her story. I spotted it. You didn’t.
No, nothing in her story was inconsistent or reasonable in inciting doubt. This new report right now is just an assertion by Cosby’s lawyer, but if it is true, then it would cast some doubt on Johnson’s story.
Yeah fuck them. Rape apologists are the worst. Personally I was raped by Hillary Clinton in 1972. Although it took me 24 years to realize this, anyone defending that raping bitch totally suck.
And 15 pages into this thread. You are a bit slow on the uptake, even by moron standards. Your momma must have been real proud of you. When she wasn’t raping you with a thermometer.
That’s not surprising.
A lot of people have difficulties with probability concepts. (Which is one reason it’s easy to mislead people with probability and statitistical arguments.)
I don’t think anyone’s made a good probabilistic argument in this thread, but I can’t claim to be completely sure of that since I also don’t think anyone’s made a clear argument. Could you set down, as clearly as you can, the good probabilistic argument you think has been made?
WTF?
I don’t see any lack of clarity here, see e.g. post #670. So I attribute the confusion to other sources, and am unsure if continued rehashing would be productive.
That’s because iiandyiiii is an asshole.
You can, if you want to for whatever reason, use the frequency of consent vs non-consent in the woman’s history for a prior probability, but it is wrong to attach much (or, really, any) significance to this, since to then go on to compute the probability you’re interested in (the posterior probability) you have to then add into the mix a complex of probabilities that bear on the particular case. This is going to swamp the prior probability arrived at by comparing consent to non consent in her sexual history.
Another way of making what amounts to the same point: You could also, just as validly, use the frequency of false to true rape claims in the population in general for your prior probability. Then you go on to add all the other stuff into the mix, and it turns out the fact that she has had a lot of consensual sex before won’t change things much, because almost all women who have been raped have had a lot of consensual sex prior to the rape accusation.
The basic heuristic in plain English is to ask the question: “How surprising is a rape accusation given that a woman has had sex consensually X number of times before?” Raising X doesn’t make the rape accusation much more (or less) surprising, if at all.
(On the assumption that you meant “accused of rape”)
It’s not completely clear what your argument is here since you throw in “identical levels of evidence against them.” If you think one accusation is more likely to be true than the other, then you ipso facto do not think there are identical levels of evidence in the two cases.
I’m assuming what you mean is that the evidence is all exactly the same except for the fact that one victim is a prostitute and the other a nun.
(Note though that for everything to be exactly the same would require they be in similar locations, at a similar time of day, among a similar crowd, and so on. There are many possible ways this could go, and they’d have a very large effect on the estimates of probabilities here. A way around this is to assume we simply don’t know much about the accusations at all, just that one person is a nun, one a prostitute, both accused a man of rape, and each man states that sex occurred. But then that very lack of knowledge of any details should make us put almost no confidence in our probability estimates.)
What we’d have to do, then, is find out what fraction of prostitute-involved sexual encounters are rapes, and find out what fraction of nun-involved sexual encounters are rapes. That is how we can know whether a nun’s rape accusation is inherently more believable than a prostitute’s. Do you have any information bearing on these two questions?
I don’t, because I don’t know how often nuns have sex and how often they are raped, and I don’t know how often prostitutes have sex and how often they are raped. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised at all if rapes are more frequent (among sex encounters) when it comes to prostitutes than they are among sex encounters when it comes to nuns. After all prostitutes tend to be in a much more vulnerable position than nuns, overall.
So for me the right answer is to say I don’t know which probability is greater. Do you have information that lets you make a sensible judgment about the two probabilities such that that one is greater than the other?
Huh. I don’t recall anything contentious between us.
There’s another complication, by the way. If all I know is one is a prostitute and the other is a nun, then I already have just by virtue of those facts an understanding as to why the nun would be motivated to lie, and no corresponding understanding as to why the prostitute would be motivated to lie.
One could add details to the story to make things such that I can see why the prostitute has a motivation to lie, but this would ruin the “identical levels of evidence” aspect of the scenario.
Drunky brings his own contention to the party.
Quite possibly it will. But my point is not and has never been that prior sexual history is the be-all-and-end-all and determines the correct verdict on its own. I’m only saying that in cases where the issue boils down to whether a specific sex act or acts was/were consensual versus coerced, then the prior sexual history of the victim has a bearing on the likelihood of it being one or the other. There would obviously be a lot of other factors that also have a bearing, and those should be considered too.
You could (assuming it was known). You’ll notice that people frequently raise arguments of this sort in these threads, and I assume juries consider these things as well. What we’re discussing here is whether prior sex history has zero bearing on the likelihood of what happened and should thus be ignored altogether.
That’s more true in some cases than others. But beyond that, “have had a lot of consensual sex” is a pretty broad description. The specific type of consensual sex that a given defendant might well be much more consistent with some people’s history than with others. For example, in the DSK case, much was made of the implausibility of his claim that the sex contact was consensual given the brevity of the encounter with a woman who he had never met before. That would indeed be very atypical of many women including many who “have had a lot of consensual sex” in the past, and argued against his story. But if you could introduce evidence that this particular woman had a history consistent with this type of behavior, that would change the equation.
Correct as to both assumptions.
It was a hypothetical and an illustration of the concept, and not intended as a likely scenario. And again, the point is not that you can put an exact number on a probability estimate, only that it has a bearing on the case.
As above it’s not about the overall probabilities but about the likelihood in the situation at hand. In an example similar to the DSK situation above, I would be reasonably sure that a higher percentage of nuns who had sex in that situation were raped than prostitutes. If you have something about nuns, then substitute 22 year old virgins if you’d like. Whatever.
The bottom line is that while prior sexual history will rarely if ever be the sole determinant of what happened, it will frequency be relevant to the odds of Story A being true versus Story B, even though (as with most other evidence) it will be hard to put precise numbers on it.
Wilt Chamberlain had consensual sex with 20,000 women in his lifetime. He was never raped once. Nor did any of them (that I know of) accuse him of rape. The frequency of sex or number of sexual partners does not statistically increase the probability of rape. While a rapist can have consensual sex with a person and a person can have consensual sex with a rapist, like Mrs. Cosby for example, the cause of rape isn’t the frequency of sex or sexual partners, the cause is a rapist forcing himself/herself on a victim and nothing else.
Thus endeth the fucking lesson in causation and the misuse of statistics.
nm
No. That would be ridiculous.
But how about you answer this? Suppose there’s video of a guy robbing a bank and the guy’s claim is that his identical twin brother was the guilty party. Do you agree that this guy establishing that he has an identical twin brother is relevant to the case, and if established raises the likelihood that he’s innocent?
If the answer is “yes”, then the following question is logically analogous to what you just asked me.
Would you agree that what you’re saying implies that having an identical twin brother makes a person less likely to rob a bank?
I had deleted the post before your reply–I need to rephrase what I was trying to ask.
The whole “who’s more likely to be raped / lie / have sex” sidetrack is totally meaningless.
Statistics is the aggregation of data points.
They nothing about specific instances, and even less about subjective instances.
Every single rape accusation needs to be judged on its merits.
Which is why I personally have such a problem with the Cosby accusations - not because they are “unbelievable” on their face, nor because they are unlikely, or I think they couldn’t have happened -
More because I am not willing to crucify someone for an accusation towards something that happened 30 years ago, where there isn’t corroboration, where the “facts” aren’t clear, and where there is zero prospect that the accused can mount any meaningful defense.
It’s possible that the women were drunk and had sex, it’s possible they got drunk but Cosby was a gentleman, it’s possible that he drugged them and fucked them silly while they were unconscious - but 30 years later, how the hell are we supposed to make any reasoned analysis as to which is most likely? Absent any other corroborating evidence?
So what should the women do? Just suck it up? Take one for the team? Watch a guy who used his power to assault a string of young actresses keep bringing in accolades, honors, fortunes and the respect of millions? Just forget how they were accused of lying, ignored or dismissed for years and years, until they discovered they weren’t the only one?
There isn’t an easy way to justice here, but justice definitely isn’t served by just letting Cosby keep winning the game of life while a large number of women with objectives plausible claims get told to just shut up and stop rocking the boat.