Dummy:
If you are unable to read my posts for what they actually say, instead of what you wish to read into them, then stop participating in this thread.
Not once in this thread, or anywhere, have I ever said that white-on-black rape doesn’t exist. Have I?
HAVE I? Answer me. Have I?
I suspect that the bulk of arguments on the other side are what Zoe has offered up here: it’s compassionate and decent to forget about the cold and analytical statistical conclusions. Making any sort of analysis at all based on race is not decent or compassionate, and for that reason, stats should be ignored.
And in fact, the more I think about it, the more I see that this is an issue that is too highly charged for it to be possible to consider with the cold light of reason.
I have hot-button issues like this myself, where my past experience has created certain strong convictions that are relatively unassailable now.
People are talking past each other here. I’m getting irritated because people are not responding to the actual text I’m writing; they are responding to an argument they’ve written for themselves and imputed to me. And people are getting irritated at me because I lack the decency, sense, and compassion to see that this is not about numbers, cold and impersonal, but people, who are individuals and act and hurt and need not to be dismissed as some faceless part of a spreadsheet.
And of course, the thread has now moved well beyond the OP comment on the ‘88’ in Huerta’s name.
So for all these reasons, I am going to ask that the thread be closed. I have no idea if this is sufficient reason to do so, but it’s clear to me that it’s the prudent course. Regardless of the mod’s decisions, I won’t be posting in it any more.
And I apologize to anyone whose feelings I have offended by my seeming insensitivity. This issue is obviously more important than winning a technical point on the parsing of statistical usefulness. I don’t believe the win or loss on that point is sufficient to keep picking at a wound that hurts this badly.
I’m sorry for having done that up til now.
Mods, I ask that this thread be closed.
Did you read the LW thread? Because over and over again I’ve been hammering this particular point.
In two sentences: White-on-black rape might be disproportionately low because when it comes to forming intimate relationships–the number one risk factor of rape–whites tend to stick with whites and blacks stick with blacks. The racial mix of the US population is not a heterogenous blend; there is still a lot of self-segregation going on that reduces proximate factors that also contribute to rape-risk.
The only reason why someone would assume that white-on-black rape would be proporitionate to the norm is if they assumed “free-love” existed between the races and they assumed that blacks and whites are evenly dispersed throughout the country. But all one has to do is visit Ames, Iowa or Detroit, Michigan and it’s quite amazingly obvious that this is not so.
I’m really getting tired of posting the same information repeatedly. But here’s the same cite from the CDC that I posted in that other thread. Everything is there that you need to know.
Another factor is that even if one were to use statistics, the most biased of cites states that the percentage of false rape claims is far lower than the percentage of valid rape claims. Therefore, even if one wants statistics to to be the sole factor when considering credibility, then believing the claimant would be the correct thing to do.
So we have a person make an accusation which is true more often than not, regarding a specific subset of a crime which happens weekly in the state of North Carolina. Not believing her would be going against the statistics, not the other way around.
as has been repeatedly stated, crime (of any nature) often has more to do w/proximity than anything else. Criminals will often commit their crimes relatively locally, close to where they live. So, a white rapist in a rural, mostly white area would then be more likely to rape a white, a black in a heavily minority area would be more likely to rape another black or other minority vs. a white.
there seems to be some confusion, as well, about another issue.
statistics can be reliably used to predict the relatively liklihood an event will happen in the future.
it is improperly used to gauge IF a single (possible) event happened in the past.
so the example about the biologist is focusing on the predictive nature of future events, vs. 'did that fisherman there tell the truth when he claimed to have caught a particular (rare but possible) fish.
none of the ‘its a rare event, therefore it’s more likely she’s lying’ crowd has addressed that point. why is it more believable that a black woman claiming to be raped by a white man is lying than it is to believe that a white woman is lying when claiming to be raped by a white male?
This is new to you?
Regards,
Shodan
Bricker, what is the thrust of your argument?
That the probability of hitting a certain color or number on the roulette table and is anywhere analogous to the likelihood of a white man raping a black woman? These are apple and orange comparisons!
Random events subject to statistical odds predetermined by natural law have no place in a discussion about non-random human behavior. Your argument is a strawman because the “probablistic model” argument put forth by your colleague works with random events but does jack shit with individual human beings. If he’d been talking about roulette instead of a particular instance where a crime may have taken place, I would have not challenged him at all.
“Cold and analytical statistical conclusions”. Is that what you think you’ve been using? Ninja liquor store robbers? Hitting a color on the roulette table? These kind of arguments are what you are using to show that I’m stupid?
I can understand why you want to close the thread, but don’t pretend that its because you’ve suddenly grown a heart.
Not hardly. It’s more about a) being correct and b) being just. You are interested in justice, right? I know you like to be correct.
The fact is that individual events affect population prevalence numbers, not the other way around.
Say you’re a researcher, and you sample 99 people, generating a rate of 25% for a given behavior. The next person you include in the sample will either be a 1 or a 0. She will make your prevalence rate either 26% or 24%. You won’t influence whether she actually experienced that behavior or not.
You’re approaching it by saying, “Well, if the rate of rapes of black women by white men is 17%, I have an 83% chance of guessing right if I guess that the event did not happen.” First, that might be true if you had a member of the sample from which the prevalence rate came. But you don’t.
Now, if your statistics are correct, you might be in the ballpark with your prediction about the future rate of an event within a population. But when it comes to your prediction about an individual, you are going to be either 100% right or 100% wrong.
It would be an injustice to be swayed away from the truth about a person because of your misapplication of population statistics.
This is not only extremely patronizing but still wrong. There IS no “technical point” to be won by citing your statistics. That’s what you don’t seem to understand and that’s what’s pissing everyone off. Spare us your sanctimony, please. No one here has any problem with considering the facts soberly and analytically. They just don’t mean what you think they mean and you seem to be having a difficult time grasping when statistics are useful and when they are not.
BZZT, wrong answer, Bricker. Close the thread?! Hell no. I tried that once myself, and it got me a face full of “you coward, how dare you”. I guess you’re a more well-known and respected poster, so people might not say that to you, but I will:
You coward, how dare you.
As a heretofore silent audience member, I just wanted to pipe up to reassure ywtf and monstro that all is not as bleak and hopeless as it may appear at the moment. Some people actually do grasp the difference between statistics and probability and do understand that these tools are patently inadequate for determining the credibility of a single report of a particular (actually possible) incident. I join you, however, in your befuddlement and frustration at the fact that people like Bricker and Random either don’t get it or willfully refuse to get it. Bricker’s near-constant stream of abuse directed at you two merely adds to my disgust with him.
Random, your actuary/insurance sidetrack is not at all on point. Sure the 17-year-old male will pay higher car insurance rates. So what? The question is this: a 40-year-old married woman you work with comes to you and confesses that while she was out on a late night diaper-run to the convenience store last month she pulled up at a stop-light and found herself next to a muscle car. The young male driver indicated that he wanted to drag race off the light with her and she decided on a whim to compete. Do you discount her report of this incident because the actuarial tables say that 40-year-old married women are extremely unlikely to participate in drag-racing? What if she tells you she got such a thrill out of it that since then she’s been participating in illicit street drag-racing on the weekends?
Look, I stopped reading the LW thread way back when the stats first became a bone of contention because it was such a ridiculous and frustrating turn for the discussion to take. That sensible people pointed out the gross misuse to which the stats were being put in that context and encountered nothing but vitriol and abuse for their efforts leaves me slightly nauseated. That the vitriol and abuse has continued over much of this 9-page thread really is shameful.
As to the original point of this OP, I will say that I knew to which part of Huerta88’s handle Bricker was referring in his thread title. I was previously aware of the the whole 88/HH thing, but in the distant sort of way that means the handle itself doesn’t set off instant alarm bells in my head but a thread title pointing out that the handle may cause alarm bells to go off in other people’s heads was immediately understandable to me. As others said, back before this became LW-redux, I know that if I had been ignorant of the 88 thing and had incorporated 88 into my username for whatever reason, then had it pointed out to me that some people would see that and wonder about it due to its use by neo-Nazis, I would burn up the internet with emails to mods asking for a name change. Obviously, everybody’s different, and I don’t much care what Huerta does or doesn’t do. He seems to be an unpleasant sort anyway, so I don’t plan to spend any time worrying about it.
I’ll try this one other way.
Bricker, statistics may predict, hypothetically, that 1% of rapes in a given community will be committed by white men against black women. It is reasonable to extropolate from this that 1 of every 100 women who report being raped will be black and will say the rapist was white. That’s where the predictions stop. Statistics cannot predict the “credibility” of an individual accuser nor do they say anything about plausibility (which has no relationship to statistical frequency). Every accuser is statistically equally credible unless you can show that black accusers are more likely to lie. Your basic mistake is that you are erroneously extropolating accuser credibility from a predicted rate of statistical frequency in reporting.
This is not a question of people being too emotional and sensitive to understand your oh so cold analytical numbers, it’s a question of YOU not understanding what your own numbers can and cannot predict.
I just wanted to repeat this post because it explains everything perfectly, and I wish I had been able to state it this clearly myself.
[soapbox] Way too many people these days are too ignorant about statistics.
Even many people I know who have taken statistics courses in university (and got good grades) are still ignorant, but don’t realize it - they learned about how to perform statistical calculations but not about how to properly apply statistics. [/soapbox]
Bricker, we addressed your roulette question. I want you to address (or at least silently ponder) the question I addressed to you:
Thanks.
And of course the reason that actuary tables of behaviors vs demographics work is because insurance companies use them when insuring large numbers of individuals. They’re not counting on every 17 year old to be a drag racer, but they know if they insure a large number of such individuals, they can fairly accurately predict how many of them will be drag racers. You couldn’t use those statistics to determine whether or not any given 17 year old is lying when he said he didn’t drag race last night.
Except the times you’d be wrong. That’s the danger of odds as a predictor. They don’t predict individual instances, just overall frequencies. Overall it will be rare to hit a Keno jackpot, but every game has the potential to win.
A lot of the people who are arguing statistics as a predictor of the truth value of a specific instance of an event seem to be approaching something like Zeno’s Paradox. The tighter your focus on the validity of frequency statistics as a predictor of an indvidual instance the more you lose sight of the big picture. The big picture is that the event DOES occur sometimes. Achillies WILL pass that turtle, people WILL win Keno jackpots, and white men DO rape black women. The truth value of a particular claim can not be established, or disproven, with this type of statistics. If that is the only tool available to you then refraining from issuing a judgement on the truth value of the claim is the most prudent course of action.
Enjoy,
Steven
Ooooo, that’s gotta sting!