Don’t be a jerk. I’m not defending rapists.
So now that the number of women substantiating is up to 25 (and maybe more) reporting the same methods, do they substantiate each other or are they all a bunch of liars? (Incidentally, good for you for not jumping on the sluts are all statistically liars train.)
Is the account of a woman, or 25 women, “substantiation” or hot air? I suppose the nature of the word “substantiate” requires at least two. By the time this thread was started it was a dozen. How many is substantiate? Or do women just not count when they say something?*
*As another poster suggested above, I only take this position of counting the rights of women on the SDMB as equal to that of men in hopes of getting laid by the righteous feminists of the SDMB. Being a guest since 2008, I have to report that this method is not effective, as not one lady of the SDMB has graced my bed and put up with my snoring, much less stuck her hand down my pants. I do want to remind the ladies that I use my lawyerly birth control at all times: my personality.
Still in this thread, Monty? You must have a high tolerance for being screeched at.
Hilarious. TSS embarrasses himself with his comments. You embarrass an entire profession.
Yes, it bothers me when people complain about being generalized and then get some payback by broadly generalizing.
It’s not just women. I’m an asshole with everybody who does that.
It really doesn’t need qualifications. You are an asshole. I imagine that there is an exception when you are sleeping.
More accusers does not necessarily equal substantiation. It could simply be indicative of a bandwagon.
Is that what you contend it is in Mr. Cosby’s case? When even one of his male staff has substantiated? And if it is a “bandwagon” why isn’t it millions of women, some of whom have never been near Cosby? What is the cause of this “bandwagon”? The George Will presumption that it is cool to be a victim of rape? Please enlighten us.
When you say it does not “necessarily” equal substantiation, doesn’t that depend on each and every accuser “necessarily” being a liar?
In fact each accuser after the first necessarily substantiates his methods and deeds until such a time as one or more of the accusers are proven to be liars, not merely tarred with the brush of potentially being a liar.
It really, really bothers all reasonable people when someone makes broad generalizations about the characters of any group that isn’t self-defined. Well, I guess that’s a generalization about “reasonable people.” Sue me!
Do you think that is what’s happening in this case?
The problem with this is that not only are you being stupid but you actually are stupid, and further, you combine your stupidity with an arrogance that makes it futile to try to explain things to you, let alone to prove things to you.
You can take that as you will, but my point is just that your challenge is pointless. It’s a waste of time to try to explain anything to you. Your position is entirely based on a fundamental lack of understanding of probability concepts, and those who maintain this position are motivated by a desire to have a woman’s sexual history be irrelevant, combined with ignorance of probability.
There may be a good argument to be made somewhere, but I have shown that your posts and jtgain’s posts trying to defend some such argument have failed to do so. Among other things, you guys seem to be making the fundamental error of confusing quantity with frequency.
BigT’s posts have been for the most part on target. It is fairly laughable for you to be calling him stupid.
I’m content to leave it there.
I’d rather have some fools on a MB think I’m completely wrong about something than to waste my time trying to convince people who are ignorant and are unable and/or unwilling to educate themselves.
For the record, here’s a distilled version of the argument I take both of you to be making.
P1: Person A has had consensual sex a greater number of times than person B
P2: Person A and Person B have both just been involved in a sexual encounter.
P3: Person A and Person B both claim the encounter was a rape.
C: It is more probable that person A is lying than that person B is lying
Given that argument, the two main criticisms I have are:
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From P1 it does not follow that person A consents more frequently than person B. But we need to know about that frequency in order to make judgments about probabilities
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The conclusion requires us to ignore information given in the scenario laid out by the premises, since it requires us to use “sexual encounters” as the reference class instead of “sexual encounters in which one person claims a rape occurred.”
F-P, as far as I can tell in this thread it has been you who has misunderstood basic probability concepts, and does not realize s/he needs to revise some assumptions. I’m no expert in probability, and I wouldn’t say I use these concepts every day, but analyzing some basic probabilistic arguments is something that I do have to do on occasion in my line of work. It’s easily possible I’ve got some basic misunderstanding or other, and I could defer to an expert here, but in the past my analyses have been verified on examination by people who know what they’re talking about, precisely on topics like this one (choice of reference class, the semantics of probability statements, etc) so I feel I’ve got a leg to stand on here. You seem to think you know something I don’t–but it’s not at all clear that this is true. Rather the reverse would seem to be the case, as far as I can see.
I don’t go for this type of credential-flashing. But if you’re going to trot out your ocaisionally using probability in your line of work, I would suggest that the level of training and testing and using probability concepts in becoming and being an actuary is quite likely just a bit more rigorous than some guy who ocaisionally has to use such concepts in his line of work. So even besides for the obvious fact that you’re missing the boat, even if I just take a step and consider whether to take seriously the likelihood that I’m completely ignorant of basic probability while you are the guy who understands it (let alone complete idiots like BigT) I think the probability of this is rather low.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say that might convince you that you’re the one who needs to take pause rather than me or BigT. (Or explain whence my own confidence here other than some inflated sense of general competence.) You’ll note the “credentials” I “flashed” are pretty weak in the scheme of things, and I clearly indicated, with actual words, that I’d “defer to experts” here.
Okay, then can you give me the technical explanation for the error you think I’m committing? I think you’ve been holding back, so far, trying to put it in layman’s terms, and that could easily be the problem here. Put it in math for me.
See the distilled version of the argument I gave above. Is it an inaccurate summary of your argument? If so, how should it be changed to make it more accurate? Or if it’s accurate, how do my two objections not apply? Again, it’s okay to use math on me here. Trying to put it into everyday English may actually be confusing things more than necessary.
Here’s two different arguments:
Argument 1 is okay. Its conclusion does follow from its premises.
Argument 2 is not okay. Its conclusion does not follow from its premises. (Well, I guess on consideration I should qualify that: it is not as clear that its conclusion follows, and it at least depends on information we don’t presently have, see below.)
What’s the difference? Obviously, the presence of that third premise in argument 2. It changes things. It is additional information, which (since it’s included in the scenario) we’d be wrong to ignore in thinking about the relevant probabilities. Specifically, the change we have to make is, instead of just looking at how frequently the two people have sex, (which yields one probability judgment), we now have to look also at how frequently rape accusations turn out to be lies. (That’s really all we have to fall back on given the paucity of information in the scenario.)
I think what happens is, some people see argument 2, and think of it as simply argument 1, plus a new premise, like this:
But this only works if conclusions drawn from one set of premises can always be drawn from other sets of premises that include the original set. As it happens, when we’re talking about probabilistic reasoning, this doesn’t always work. For example, the following pair of arguments:
Argument 4 works, argument 5 does not, even though the conclusion in both cases is the same and the premises of 5 entirely contain the premises of 4.
I might be making a mistake in taking this up but …
Additional information of unknown value does not change the probability.
If in a given scenario absent the additional information A is more likely than B, then mere speculation that the additional information might change the answer in some unknown direction and unknown magnitude does not change the probability.
See above. You’re postulating in Argument 5 that you know that both these guys work at night. If you didn’t know anything about either but are merely speculating that they might work at night, then you’re back in the Argument 4 position.
[One important thing to remember is that no one is claiming that prior sexual history is all you need to know and settles the issue on its own. The claim is that it has a bearing on the likelihood of the accuser’s version being correct versus the accused’s version, and the counter claim is that it has zero bearing.]
Imagine the following argument, based on 5 above:
Compare with Argument 3 above, and you can see how one can be led astray if one treats sub-conclusions in probabilistic arguments like this as firmly established before taking all available information into account.
The fact that a rape claim has been made is new information, and has to be thrown in the mix. It is an important part of the available evidence, and can’t be ignored in order to form any kind of “subconclusion” on the model of arguments 6 and 3 above.