[QUOTE=you with the face]
[QUOTE=bored mathematician]
If Huerta88 ever digs up data to the effect that reports of white-on-black rape are significantly more likely (in the statistical sense) to be false than those of white-on-white, I see no reason why he, as a private citizen who is hypothetically not aware of any other facts about the situation, shouldn’t put more faith in the latter.
You obviously aren’t reading this thread anymore. Why are you still posting in it?
The sun rising is not comparable to crime stats! One is governed by the laws of nature. The other is governed by humans.
We know that the sun is rising tomorrow because that’s all we’ve known and there’s no reason to believe that the earth is suddenly going to stop turning. But tomorrow any one of else could be jumped in an alley, and there’s no freaking way we can predict who it’s going to be, when or where.
I would think someone with “mathematician” in their handle with realize the silliness of this line of argument. Seriously. Do you believe that population-based data can be used to say whether or not you are being truthful when you say something has happened to you? 'Cause that’s what we’ve been talking about when we’ve said the whole thing about pop-based data being extrapolated to the individual level.
I’m interested in hearing what you have to say.
When making the assertion that your pension is more likely to be stolen by a white man, do you come to that conclusion solely from crime stats? Or do you determine this using your understanding of the world around you? My main position in this thread is that people are way too willing to form their assessments around numbers that some egg-head collected, instead of using common sense.
What do you mean? What do you want me to put up? You’ve registered as “bored mathemetician” apparently for the sole purpose of posting to this thread in support of Huerta88. You’ve posted a bunch of nonsense using some statistical terminology. Your manner of using the terminology and the logic you put forth suggests to me that you have no idea what you are talking about.
What exactly, again, am I supposed to put up? I can tell you I’m not going to put up with your bullshit.
What’s the difference? To me, and to many other people, crime and the rising of the sun are both just interactions of a large number of particles, interactions that can be described statistically.
Natural phenomena can be uncertain as well. Meteorologists observe the current weather and make predictions based on weather patterns observed in the past. Sometimes their forecasts include probabilities: 50% chance of rain. What does this mean to you? In your world, it’s either going to rain or it isn’t. In mine, it means that the forecaster believes that in half of the possible worlds consistent with his observations, it will rain; and in the other half, it will not.
And no one can predict exactly where the raindrops will fall. But they will fall.
Suppose I sincerely believed that I had been molested by aliens who landed in a UFO, I would probably be quite anguished to find out that very few people believe me. But the rest are being reasonable, since there have been large numbers of such claims and zero proof.
More plausibly, suppose I had been hit by lightning and survived. It happens, though it’s rare. My friends (and I don’t think it’s just them) would almost certainly not be willing to take my word for it, but if I showed them where my T-shirt burned, they would be more willing to believe me. If my buddy snapped a picture of me getting hit, they would almost certainly believe me. Since I’ve told tall tales in the past, however, they believe at first that I’m probably just pulling their leg.
In both of the preceding examples, I know the “truth” of the matter. Now consider a scenario in which I don’t. Suppose I get black-out drunk one night. When I wake up the next morning, my wallet is gone and there’s a hole in my window. Maybe someone broke in and stole my wallet. Or maybe I was belligerent and threw it out the window. I don’t which it was, and neither does anyone else other than the possible thief. If I live in a town where breaking and entering is rare, and my friends have told me in the past that I’m a crazy drunk, should I look outside before calling the police?
I believe it is reasonable to start with the hypothesis that past events are a good proxy for possible worlds. If only 10% of rape accusations to date are false, I’ll put more stock in the accuse-r’s word than that of the accused, but I’ll be pretty sure that this level will later change. If the cops find inculpatory DNA evidence or the accused has a rock-solid alibi, I’ll put a lot more or a lot less stock in the claim respectively.
If the only fact I know about a case are that the accused is blue and the accuser is green, and I know that when green people accuse blue people they’re almost always lying, I’ll conclude, as a private citizen with only a passing interest in the news, that the green person is probably lying. If I’m the district attorney, I’ll be a lot more careful, since I help make the statistics, and it would be all too easy for me to create feedback loops.
That being said, as a private citizen I can still create feedback loops in more subtle ways. Perhaps I know that blue people are more likely to beat me up and take my money. If I cross over to the other side of the street when I see a blue person coming, maybe I’ve decreased the likelihood that I’ll be a victim, but blue people will feel unwelcome by others’ actions towards them and become more likely to victimize me. Unfortunately, this kind of racism seems to be rather common. I don’t know how to solve it.
My pension is managed by white men and unfortunately, it seems likely that if they are replaced, their replacements will also be white and male. I’m too lazy to dig out a statistic for the latter, since I don’t think this is a point of contention. That being said, statistics do inform my perception of things. Once I learned how often people have died while driving cars in the past versus how often people have died on airplanes, my feeling of safety in the former went way down and the latter way up.
I’ll try to read your reply, but posting in this thread raises my blood-pressure enough that I may not respond.
And I’m not going to put up with yours. I don’t believe I’m siding with Huerta88, as he apparently believes that since black-on-white rape reports are less common than white-on-white reports, the conditional probability of a white-on-black report being true is lower. In case you haven’t been reading carefully, I don’t share that opinion. I was merely countering a horse-shit analysis with another one to demonstrate how the garbage-in-garbage-out principle works.
This is the second time you have claimed that I am posting “nonsense”. Since I am willing to stand corrected, I’m calling out you on this and would like to know specifically what you had an issue with and why.
I’ve already been specific. You promised to respond to the specifics, but have failed to so far. Setting aside the specifics, however, the biggest problem is this:
This is pure fucking nonsense.
Put it this way. Say you get a rate of 2 positive events (where positive here means that a white man raping a black woman occurred, not that it was a good thing) out of a sample of 100 black women. Let’s say you have a hat with those 100 names in it, and you draw one out. You are right that you would have a 2 in 100 chance of drawing a name that was positive for the event. If you drew a name and were forced to guess, your best bet would be to guess that you did not draw such a name.
Now, instead, say one of those 100 women comes to you and says that she experienced the event. Would you say that the chances are 2 in 100 that she is lying? Let’s say that some completely novel black woman comes to you and makes that claim. Huerta88, Bricker, and apparently yourself would say that your best bet is to believe that she is lying.
Say 100 different women come to you with the claim. Your method would appear to be to assume, or even to lean towards an assumption that they are lying. Is it your assertion that in doing so you would be wrong only 2% of the time? No? Okay, how often would you be wrong? 2% plus or minus some error bar? 20%? 50%?
The fact is, you have no fucking idea how often you’d be wrong, and your appeal to population prevalence estimates from some other sample to try to inform your thinking is just a bullshit piece of stupidity. And in the context of this discussion, you are correct to call it racist.
About your other contributions:
It makes no sense to come to this discussion talking about generating a “Poisson model.” What are you going to do to test it?
All your initial post really said is that your model would assume that there is a a particular distribution to the scores of some sample (a Poisson, rather than a Gaussian distribution or negative binomial distribution or what have you). It adds nothing to the discussion and has nothing to do with supporting a conclusion about the credibility of a claim. The only purpose I can see to bringing up what you might think would be the shape of the distribution of scores is for obfuscation.
All you’ve said here is that if you build a model on the assumption that a higher percentage of rape accusations by black women against white men are false, then the result of your model will be that a higher percentage of rape accusations by black women against white men are false.
We all knew that already – but you could have said it more succinctly, as I just have.
I agree that bored’s introduction of the Poisson process to the discussion merely obfuscates. However, a Poisson process isn’t the same as a Poisson distribution. It’s not a probability distribution of scores, it’s a distribution of events in time. A Poisson process with a rate of 100 events per year generates events at random intervals such that the average year contains 100 events. He’s not wrong, really, he’s just taking things to an irrelevant level of detail.
I also wanted to demonstrate how you can avoid spelling this assumption out by being somewhat sneaky, the way John Mace had been.
Well, you could take a look and see where the broken glass landed, inside or outside the window frame.
You know “Elementary (detective work) my dear Watson!”.
CMC fnord!
Wow. This has been going on for 26 pages?
Let me see if I can sum up the argument:
Everyone agrees that the boys will be found not-guilty. So the rest of the argument is something like:
Side 1: *You *don’t understand statitics.
Side the other: No, *you *don’t understand.
Side 1: Why don’t you read what I said?
Side the other: Why won’t *you *read what I said?
Side 1: I never brought race up *you *did.
Side the other: No *you *played the race card.
Side 1: Statistics have nothing to do with it.
Side the other: No one said that they did, and you don’t understand them anyway.
Side 1: *You *said that they did and I’m the one who understands them not you.
Both sides: You’re a doody head. No you’re a doody head.
Have I missed any nuances of the argument so far? 
And crowmanyclouds wins the thread, ladies and gentleman.
The Poisson process generates a Poisson distribution when one has the actual data, no? However, more to the point, it appears that I was interpreting him to be less abstractly theoretical than he intended. I was thinking about it in terms of supporting his conclusion, which to me implied actually testing a model, rather than abstrusely restating a faulty premise.
To the extent that my misinterpretation led to statements in my subsequent posts, I apologize bored mathemetician. However I still find no endorsement of your qualifications in your statements regarding the daily sunrise and the use of population statistics in evaluating the claims of a rape victim.
nope you nailed them 
No, he forgot the ubiquitous and always amusing meta-level posters, who come in at the end of an argument to suggest that people are all a bunch of doody-heads for participating in the argument, and then the lickspittle posters who jump in to note how right they are.
monstro and me call these posters Johnny-Come-Latelys.
Oh yeah? Well, er um, I’m not ubiquitous you’re ubiquitous. And um, if you read my post you would know that my level is much more than meta, or something like that. 
Sorry guys. I was just playing. Apparently emotions are running too high for a little teasing.
Well I believe he was teasing you and so was I–but take it for whatever makes you feel better okay
His point was that you guys have been discussing this for 26 pages and he boiled it down to the essence in a few lines. Doesn’t mean your points were worth writing and discussing-but at some point it becomes pointless doesn’t it?
You guys will NEVER convince Huerto of your position–never. I have always wondered why people continue to hit their head against a wall on an anonymous message board. I figure you give it a good shot–then you abandon your quest. Why stress yourself over what some yahoo on a message board says or thinks. By this time you have either convinced those folks on the sidelines or you haven’t–but you are wasting your time with Huerto and he is wasting his time with you guys.
my take on it anyways. Whether you agree or not really doesn’t concern me.
well at least you didn’t put me on the short bus
and sorry for busting your chops a few pages back with my comment about this–but it just seemed like an odd choice of words that someone who was trying to take the high road would use that particular word.
I gotta respond to this because while you say this all nice and sweet and stuff, the fact that you are singling me out for responding with insults speaks loudly of your own bias.
Just about everyone I’ve been arguing against have called me hateful names. Every one of them. And not just garden variety hateful names. We got brother man Huerta slinging racially-charged innuendo right from the gates. We got brother man **Contrapuntual ** lashing out in Tourette syndrome-like attacks for no reason. We got brother man Malacandra being all condescending with the “Dr” shit (even though not once have I tried to club my doctorate over anyone’s head, not once). We got Ellis Dee misrepresenting everything that I’ve been saying and doing in this thread. We’ve got Bricker and Trunk calling me stupid but not daring to step into the debate themselves. We’ve got Dragon Ash declaring that I’m a stupid douchebag and inviting everyone to weep for our goddamn gene pool. We have Weirddave calling people “lying bitch” in 32-size font. We even have Crotalus randomly coming out from no where and accusing me of blowing smoking, when it was clear that I was not.
But out of all the people in this thread, you single me out for daring to say that some of these idiots deserve to be on a shortbus. In the Pit, no less.
I never said I was trying to take the high ground. If I’m being attacked, then there’s nothing in ywtf’s code of ethics that says she can not respond in kind. So please spare me this lecture. Where were you when Huerta dropped that slavemaster rape bomb into the thread? You were no where to be seen. So take your kindly advice somewhere else. Thank you!