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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
 Posted - 02/07/2013 : 05:03:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
No, I was offering the entire range between those things. |
It didn't read that way to me.| Watson's initial response to elevator guy was appropriate. Asking guys to moderate their behavior to not be creeps is not asking much, imo. |
Actually, you thought she was "taking it too far (again)," and later called her a sexist for saying "guys, don't do that."| The stupidity that followed is the problem, and Watson's follow ups. Including your own failure to understand that population statistics are not predictive of the behavior of an individual. |
I never once thought that. You made that accusation several times, but never could provide any support for it because my argument was about perceived threats, and not whether Elevator Guy was actually a rapist or not. You refused to acknowledge that fact.| Phil plait said on his own blog that Watson "could have been raped!". |
No, he did not. He called the elevator incident a "potential assault scenario," and it was. You had a problem with the word "potential," clearly reading it as "probable" or even "certain" when all that was intended was "possible."| Nothing that has occurred since then (related to this topic) has been particularly beneficial to skepticism. |
Actually, a lot of eyes have been opened to things like unconscious sexism and the concept of privilege. Several skeptic and atheist conventions now have reasonable harassment policies. And a handful of raving misogynistic assholes have outed themselves. That's all good. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular
Norway
1273 Posts |
Posted - 02/21/2013 : 07:58:16 [Permalink]
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| In that context "potential assault scenario " loses all meaning. If possibility is the assertion, with no regards to probability, then any situation where 2 or more people are anywhere near each other could be a "potential assault scenario". I have no problem with your interpretation if you accept the fact that it makes the phrase utterly worthless. |
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| Edited by - On fire for Christ on 02/21/2013 07:59:59 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 02/21/2013 : 17:39:05 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by On fire for Christ
In that context "potential assault scenario " loses all meaning. |
The context was "creepy guy who singled Watson out and managed to be alone with her on an elevator at 4 AM." If you seriously think that there was absolutely no possibility of something worse than creepiness happening, you are delusional.| If possibility is the assertion, with no regards to probability... |
That's the dictionary definition of "potential." It's "something which can develop." There's no mention of probability (or even plausibility) in the definition, merely the possible. What did you think the word meant?| ...then any situation where 2 or more people are anywhere near each other could be a "potential assault scenario". I have no problem with your interpretation if you accept the fact that it makes the phrase utterly worthless. |
Sure, if you want to argue that an infant left alone for 30 seconds in a room with an adult who is in a persistent vegetative state due to massive brain damage is a "potential sexual assault" by crafting some sort of scenario in which one or the other of them could suddenly and quickly gain the power to intentionally sexually abuse the other, then you're right, the term "potential" has no meaning. But it'll really just look like more of the hyperskepticism in service of a sexist agenda that's become so familiar in the past couple of years. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular
Norway
1273 Posts |
Posted - 02/23/2013 : 02:01:55 [Permalink]
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| Your first response seems to conflict with the following 2. Was the insinuation that it was probable or possible? If the former, Dude was making a valid point in the first place. If the latter, my point was true. There's not a lot of room for your point of view. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 02/23/2013 : 06:38:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by On fire for Christ
Your first response seems to conflict with the following 2. Was the insinuation that it was probable or possible? If the former, Dude was making a valid point in the first place. If the latter, my point was true. There's not a lot of room for your point of view. |
Is "probable" a binary condition, or do probabilities exist along a continuum?
If on a particular day there is a 10% chance of precipitation make it probable that it will rain, or is there merely the potential for rain? If the next day the meteorologists agree the chance drops to zero, is there still a potential for rain?
Dude's point was to try to take a reasonable discussion of the threat assessments that people make about strangers all the time and turn it into a shrill caricature in order to mock it. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 04/18/2013 : 10:26:25 [Permalink]
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Dave_W said:
Dude's point was to try to take a reasonable discussion of the threat assessments that people make about strangers all the time and turn it into a shrill caricature in order to mock it.
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Yeah, that is exactly what I was doing. Good to see that you are smart enough to catch that.
What I'm saying (going back to the "elevator gate" thread) is that you can't use population statistics to assess the probability of a single individual engaging in a specific behavior. You were (and apparently still are) stuck on the idea that if 10% of a population engages in behavior X that any one person in that population has a 10% chance of engaging in X.
So if 10% of men will be rapists and you put Watson in a room with 10 men then the risk is 10%. What you are saying is that in a room alone with one guy the risk is still 10%. That is not "reasonable threat assessment", that is where the actual caricature comes into play here, so you can run around overplaying the real threat and pretend that you are extra-concerned.
Individual threat assessments have to be made based on, well, individual behavior. You can't use population statistics to predict individual behavior.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 04/18/2013 : 10:36:03 [Permalink]
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Dave_W said:
| Actually, a lot of eyes have been opened to things like unconscious sexism and the concept of privilege. Several skeptic and atheist conventions now have reasonable harassment policies. And a handful of raving misogynistic assholes have outed themselves. That's all good. |
I agree, mostly.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 04/18/2013 : 11:39:47 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
What I'm saying (going back to the "elevator gate" thread) is that you can't use population statistics to assess the probability of a single individual engaging in a specific behavior. You were (and apparently still are) stuck on the idea that if 10% of a population engages in behavior X that any one person in that population has a 10% chance of engaging in X. |
How could it be otherwise? If 10 out of 100 marbles in a sack are blue, and I reach in blindly, there's a 10% chance I'll grab a blue marble. You're claiming that I can't make such a probability assessment.| So if 10% of men will be rapists and you put Watson in a room with 10 men then the risk is 10%. What you are saying is that in a room alone with one guy the risk is still 10%. That is not "reasonable threat assessment", that is where the actual caricature comes into play here, so you can run around overplaying the real threat and pretend that you are extra-concerned. |
If the room has a billion men in it, 10% of them may rape sometime in their lifetimes. If the room has a million men in it, 10% of them may rape. If the room has a thousand men in it, 10% of them might rape. If the room has 10 men in it, 10% of them might be rapists. How/why does the probability change from 10% to some other figure when there's only a single man in the room? He's either one of the 10% or one of the 90%. We don't know, so what are the odds of him being in one group or another, based on knowing nothing more than that he is male? You haven't presented any sort of compelling argument that the correct answer is anything other than that there's a 10% that he belongs in the sometime-in-his-lifetime-rapist category.| Individual threat assessments have to be made based on, well, individual behavior. You can't use population statistics to predict individual behavior. |
So we can't say that because 80% of US citizens speak only English, that a single randomly-chosen person has an 80% chance of speaking only English? We can't say that a randomly-selected US citizen has a 19% chance of being a smoker? A 10% chance of being homosexual?
Besides which, it's a threat assessment, not a prediction of actual behavior. Saying that there's a 10% chance that EG is a rapist is not the same thing as saying that EG is a rapist. Especially since if there's a 10% chance that he was a rapist means there was a ninety percent chance that he wasn't. But according to you, we can't think that he probably wasn't a rapist, either, because we can't use population statistics to predict individual behavior.
We know that 10% of men either have raped or will rape sometime in the future. We know that being in that group does not mean that anytime one of them meets a woman he'll rape her (the vast majority of such encounters do not end in a rape), so given a random encounter with even one of the 10%, the odds are far smaller that a rape will occur. We also know that stranger rape is very much rarer than acquaintance or family rape. We also know that rapists tend to engage in certain overt behaviors (but also that those individual behaviors aren't limited to rapists). But that's all statistical, so you're saying we've got to throw all of that knowledge out because we allegedly can't use population statistics to predict individual behavior, even to say that the odds of no rape occurring when a woman encounters a man she doesn't know are much, much higher than 99%.
How else should a threat assessment be made, Dude? |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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