Let me make a very loose analogy. Assume the stripper was in the closed bathroom with the players (even that’s looking doubtful, but assume it for the moment). Assume she says something happened. Assume they say it did not. The allegations are clear cut enough (this is not a slippery-slope case of “I thought I had her consent but she now denies it”) that we can view it as a binary true:false situation.
Assume the respective claimants’ other indicia of credibility are kind of a wash (i.e., ignore the fact that she has a criminal record, ignore the fact that guilty accused people probably frequently have an incentive to issue false denials, etc.). Assume (for a moment) that no other credible evidence tips the balance either way (this is where Nifong fucked up because as we learn there appears to have been gobs of fairly neon-flashing evidence (having nothing to do with demographic patterns) particular to this case that he sat on or ignored that weighed against her report, but pass that by).
Why not then treat the bathroom as Schrodinger’s box? That is, why not treat an “already occurred but currently unknowable” event as a future event (as to which you seem to agree that past patterns (of whatever nature) could be predictive)?
If you and a bookmaker were in a sealed room preparing to watch (and wager on)the 5:30 p.m. Belmont Stakes on a 30 minute closed caption delay, would you say that the Racing Form’s report on the track record and recent performance of the two leading contenders was irrelevant to your decision as to which of them to bet on with the bookmaker at 5:55, knowing that the “actual” outcome has already occurred and mooted the predictive odds projection? Would your answer change if two touts of (let us assume) equal credibility came in at 5:45 and (for reasons of their own) said: “Dude, totally won the race!” but each identified X as a different horse?
Without disputing or agreeing with your credibility determination, the analogy wouldn’t be exact unless the person he allegedly dated called you up afterward and said (for whatever reason) – “Honey, your friend is telling everyone we went out, but I swear we didn’t,” or someone else said “For some reason Jake’s telling everyone his new squeeze is black, but I saw her and she’s actually Korean.”
So if I understand you, you are saying that unless somebody claims that something implausible/impossible happened to him or her, you are equally skeptical of the claim, whether the claim is that something common happened or that something very unlikely happened?
If I told you my mother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare form of cancer, would you be skeptical? Why?
We know that people die from Hodgkin’s ever year. More people die from breast cancer and melanoma, but that doesn’t matter. My claim is not unlikely just because it is an infrequent occurence. Hodgkin’s disease is not in the realm of predicting tomorrow’s lotto numbers, being abducted by aliens, or giving birth to a human-chimpazee hybrid, so it makes no sense to be skeptical of my claim just because it doesn’t happen everyday. It is a credible claim until proven otherwise.
Race doesn’t stop anyone from raping someone. If a rapist has it in their head to rape, they will rape. So a person’s race has no bearing on plausibility either.
Anyway, I think that most people’s common sense differs from that of Waenara
Another analogy:
Situation A: You are sitting in a bar, and the slightly drunk guy next to you offers to buy you a drink, claiming he won $1000 in the lottery that week.
Situation B: You are sitting in a bar, and the slightly drunk guy next to you offers to buy you a drink, claiming he won $100 million in the lottery that week.
Most people would be a lot more skeptical of the claim made in situation B than of the claim made in situation A. Note that winning $100 million dollars in the lottery is not implausible/impossible; it happens on a regular basis.
Your analogy doesn’t work because the drunk guy, by virtue of being drunk and trying to get me drunk, has questionable credibility. I wouldn’t believe a guy like that if he told me he was lawyer with a BMW parked outside, not because lawyers with BMWs are especially rare, but because he’s a drunk guy trying to pick me up.
Your analogy is also flawed because it has nothing to do with the case at hand. We aren’t comparing the Duke case to any other case and assessing which is more plausible. We are looking at this case in isolation and judging its plausibility.
So if I told you my mother died of a rare form of cancer would you not believe me?
Lol. I just have to laugh at this, because yes, people who are drunk and who make self-serving claims do have less credibility. Especially when they claim that something very uncommon has happened to them.
In any event, Waenara made the following claim:
Note that he made no exception for people who have questionable credibility. Thus his statement was false, as my analogy demonstrates.
Reasonable people consider at least 3 things when they evaluate a claim:
(1) the reliability of the person making the claim.
(2) what incentive the person has to lie.
(3) how likely is the event that is being claimed.
This is pretty non-controversial until you throw racial differences into the picture.
Um, no. The question is not “How rare is this?”, it is “How does this benefit the person making this particular claim as opposed to another?”
In other words, the drunk guy who said he won a million dollars has more to gain by lying than the drunk guy who said he won a $1000. But a drunk guy who said he wasted a $10,000 on losing lotto tickets and poker–as uncommon as that is–is the most believable because his admission doesn’t make him look all that seductively impressive.
Um no, again. All things being equal takes in account credibility. Two men with equally questionable credibility will have their claims viewed the same way irrespective of how common their claims are. The drunk man who says he has a pet snake will not automatically be considered more unbelievable than the drunk man who says he has a pet dog.
Okay, but what is so unlikely about rape? This is the question of the month. Why is this particular rape allegation so unlikely on its face? Why does the accuser’s race affect the plausibility of this allegation?
Inquiring minds have been begging to know. Inquiring minds are also begging to know whether you’d believe my claim about poor Ma and Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
You are wrong again, and another example will demonstrate it:
You manage a retail store and two employees, A and B, come late to work. Each employee tells you that he is late because the bus he took to work broke down. As an experienced manager, you are well aware that most employees will make up an excuse for being late even if they don’t have a good reason.
Worker A commutes on Bus Line A, which has a tremendously good reputation for maintaining its buses. In fact, out of thousands of runs, only 1 Bus Line A bus broke down in the last 5 years.
Worker B commutes on Bus Line B, which has a terrible reputation for maintaining its buses. On average, Bus Line B buses break down 1 time per week.
Each worker has an equal incentive to lie. Without any more information, whose story are you more skeptical of?
Neither one. If their credibility isn’t questionable, then I have no basis to determine that either one is lying. The worker who blamed Line B might just as easily be trying to bank on the line’s bad reputation in passing off his story, knowing that someone like you’d probably buy it hook, line, and sinker. But since I don’t have any reason to suspect anyone of lying, I accept both excuses and move the fuck on with my day.
Why are still you still stuck in the mode of comparing two claims anyway? That type of analysis has no bearing on the discussion at hand.
I wonder why you can’t answer the question about my hypothetical mother.
You’re changing the scenario. I clearly told you that you had reason to suspect that either worker might lie. Not only that, you didn’t answer the question.
The problem is that I didn’t want to engage you. You’ll note that my original question was directed towards another poster not you. I’ve read most of this thread and it appears you are either crazy or trolling. I responded to you only because you attempted to answer my question to the other poster, and of course it was a mistake.
To answer your question, yes I would be skeptical of your claim.
I did answer the question. “Neither one” was my answer. Both are equally credible in my eyes.
And I didn’t change the scenario. Both workers may have a reason to lie, but I don’t have any reason to believe that they are lying. Two different things. A pathological liar has a reason to lie–it gives them a thrill–even if they are lying about things of no consequence. But if a pathological liar tells me that they were late because their bus broke down, and I don’t know that they are a pathological liar, I have no reason to think they are lying. Because its perfectly possible that they are telling me the truth.
Is this really that hard to understand? I mean, after 27 pages of me saying the same stuff over and over again, I’m amazed that what I’m writing is so debateable.
And I think you are idiot who can’t answer basic questions but asserts that they are right no matter what. For someone who has been acting crazy and trollishly, I’ve responded to your dimwitted analogies amiably enough. Even took the time to show where they miss the mark even though you are a week late and a dollar short to the whole debate. But since I didn’t give you the answers you like, out come the insults. Nice.
It seems to me that one needs to look at the factors I alluded to earlier. Because if somebody who is reliable (a friend) and who has no obvious incentive to lie, claims that something uncommon, but not outrageously so, happened to him or her, a reasonable person will accept it.
So there’s no need to compare the likelihoods. Either way – common or uncommon – most people will believe it.
The problem comes when you are assessing the credibility of somebody who is unreliable and has an incentive to lie.
Getting back to the the duke lacrosse case, if the accuser had claimed that she was raped by a group of 60-year-old Asian Women, a reasonable person would be even more skeptical of her story.
In the Duke case, there are plenty of reasons to doubt her credibility. Conflicting/changing stories, lack of physical evidence of violent assault, lack of DNA, possible alibis for the accused from a cab driver and cell phone records, inconsistent timelines, incentive to lie, past history of unsubstantiated gang rape accusations, etc… etc…
You are generally correct in summarizing that :
If something is extremely implausible or outright impossible, then I would doubt the story. Rare events do happen. They’re rare, but do happen to someone. If a rare disease afflicts one in a million people, or a rare event happens to one in a million people, that’s still 300 affected people in the United States or 6,000 people worldwide (pop. 6 billion). Why should you disbelieve them just because their story is uncommon?
However, if there are other reasons to doubt the story (history of lying, conflicting testimony, lack of physical evidence, lack of eyewitnesses), then why do statistics need to enter into it, even as a preliminary measure? Supposing we’re talking about a rare crime, how would justice be served by using statistical prevalence of crimes to “triage” criminal investigations, as Huerta88 has suggested that we do. Assuming you solely use statistics to evaluate cases as to whether they should be investigated, there are four possible outcomes:
You disbelieve the accuser, and they were lying. No harm done. (Although, one might argue that automatically disbelieving this accuser might lead other future (truthful) accusers not coming forward, as they think they won’t be believed).
You disbelieve the accuser, and they were telling the truth. Horrendous. I can’t imagine anyone would want this.
You believe the accuser enough to investigate (remember, this is just initial belief - or, if you prefer, suspension of disbelief), and they were lying. Well, because you investigated you found actual evidence to believe they’re lying. Or maybe they were really clever about lying and weren’t flat-out caught, but since the stardard of proof to convict is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, I doubt that it would often happen that with an accuser who completely fabricated an accusation there would be enough proof to arrest, indict and convict.
You believe the accuser enough to investigate, and they were telling the truth. Hopefully your investigation found enough evidence to convict the accused, but of course this isn’t a given. Guilty people go free all the time if the burden of proof is not satisfied.
Now, tell me, how does the “statistical triage” help matters whatsoever. I really don’t see it.
You arrest/indict/convict/sentence/uphold appeals based on actual evidence. Completely impossible accusations can be ruled out, and of course they won’t have evidence to support them. However, uncommon accusations will have evidence to support them, or they won’t. But this has nothing to do with the prevalence rate of that specific type of event. It has to do with physical and circumstantial evidence.
To Huerta88, you said
Well, of course that would be additional evidence. Then I’d have to decide who’s more credible individually, if there is corroborating testimony on one side or the other, or if there’s other evidence. I might end of disbelieving my friend, but that would have absolutely nothing to do with the size of the black population in Alberta, Canada. Statistics are irrelevant. That was the point of this anecdote. Credibility and evidence are relevant. The statistics are not.
Just as in the Duke case. Based on the total information published so far, I think the accuser is lying. I’ve never said otherwise. However, this has to do with the evidence, and not at all with her race or that of the accused.
So, you do agree with me, you with the face, monstro and many others.
Unreliable people who have an incentive to lie are less credible. Brilliant deduction!
Now what does that have to do with their race? Or any other arbitrary statistic about them?
If you know someone who tells you that they, sadly, have numerous medical conditions, maybe some rare ones, but definitely many more medical problems than your average joe, would you definitely doubt them, just because it’s uncommon? I guess you could, but it would say more about your character than anything else.
However, if they’re a known hypochrondriac who is “diagnosed” with a new condition every other week but miraculously continues to survive without any evidence of actual illness, then of course you’d be correct to doubt them when they announce a new diagnosis. They might even be honest this time. That’s sad, but unfortunately a reality that their history of lying caused the disbelief.
Aesop’s fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is over 2,500 years old. You’d have to be somewhat strange not to doubt a known liar.
But doubting someone automatically, in the absence of other reasons to question their credibility, simply because their situation is rare, is not logical.
Ok, so would you be more skeptical if the Duke accuser told you that she had won $1000 in the lottery or if she told you she won $100 million in the lottery?
(And you can assume for the sake of argument that she has no incentive to lie about either lottery win to you. She’s just telling you for whatever reason what she won in the lottery.)
Any reasonable person would be more skeptical of the latter claim. I would be willing to bet serious money that she had not won $100 million as she had claimed. Not so for the $1000 claim.
There’s more to it than that. (I’ll assume that you are not deliberately misunderstanding me.) Unreliable people who have an incentive to lie are less credible, especially when their claim is that something very unusual happened to them.
Again, if the Duke rape accuser told me she won $1000 in the lottery, I would be skeptical but I wouldn’t bet my car that she was lying. If she told me that she won $100 million in the lottery, I would bet my car in a second that she was lying.
Most reasonable people would agree with me.
By the way, has anyone so far in this thread mentioned Bayes Thereom?
If you can wrap your mind around the mathematics, you will see why prior probabilities can and do matter.
Two classic math problems, involving the “rare disease”:
There is a rare disease that affects 1 in 1000 members of the population. There is also a test for the rare disease that is 99% accurate. In other words, if you have the disease and you take the test, there is a 99% chance that the test will come back positive. At the same time, if you don’t have the disease, there is a 99% chance that the test will come back negative.
Suppose that a random person takes the test and it comes back positive. What is the probability that he has the disease?
Second math problem: Same as the first, except the disease is extremely rare and affects 1 in 1 million members of the population.
Work through the math, you will see that prior probabilities can and do matter.