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Certainly. This why I wrote 'universally discriminated', by which I meant in the sense that black people and women have historically been discriminated against.

• thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Well, unwillingness to hire men as nurses is hard to attribute to greater criminality. Much heavier criminal sentences for men seems more on point. Early male obstetricians (really, doctors who started researching childbirth) were not well thought of by midwives. Could you elaborate on the special sense of "universal discrimination" you're talking about?
  • dalke 11y ago
    Are you really asking me for a history of discrimination in the US, including prohibitions against voting or owning land, the Separate Car Act leading to Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow laws, the American Indian boarding schools, redlining, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, and Japanese interment camps? Perhaps 'universal' isn't the precise term, but I lack a more nuanced term, and it captures the idea that many more people don't like Obama simply because he is black than those who don't like him simply because he is a man. The examples you gave are also less universal. I agree that single males in the US face discrimination for being at or near a playground or around children in general more than women do. But that is not as universal as non-whites forced to leave so-called 'sundown towns' by sunset, or the "Tacoma Method" used to expel Chinese residents from cities in the west coast. Going back to the OP, the recent prejudice against unaccompanied males near playgrounds is another example of how humans don't really use a Bayesian analysis.
    • thaumasiotes 11y ago
      You brought this up as an argument against the idea that people discriminate based on (roughly) Bayesian estimation of what other people are likely to be like. Specifically, you heavily imply that if people were discriminating based on rough Bayesian estimation, there would be some level of discrimination against men as potential criminals (since they make up roughly all of the criminals) which does not obtain now. I disagree; I think men suffer a lot of discrimination as potential criminals. I want to know what you think should be happening to men (if people were using a roughly Bayesian approach), and what you think is happening to men, and why you think it's not compatible with the idea that what people are doing can be modeled as a Bayesian approach.
      • dalke 11y ago
        I gave several examples of non-Bayesian reasoning going into discrimination, with blood type being the most prominent. Hence I conclude that thinking about discrimination primarily as humans applying Bayesian reasoning is not a useful framework to think about the -isms. I see no need to introduce a new mathematical framework given the historical evidence says there is no such simple explanation. We need only look at how humans do risk management. Driving is dangerous, and one of the leading causes of death. Yet people are more scared of airplane crashes, despite how flying is a less dangerous means of transportation. Or, parents are increasingly worried about the safety of their children despite the clear evidence that childhood now is safer than ever. We also see people who gamble on the lottery with the incorrect belief that there are winning streaks or lucky numbers. Thus, human responses are clearly neither Bayesian nor frequentist. I therefore don't see why you think a Bayesian approach, or something close to a Bayesian approach, helps understand the topic. FWIW, an analysis of the sex-based skew in the prison population would also need to look to many other factors, such as the huge increase in incarceration rates over the last few decades, the strong racial component, the different social roles of men and women in US culture, and more. Such a model would also need to explain why, if people thought that men are inherently more dangerous then women and "suffer a lot of discrimination as potential criminals", so many more social roles which require trust or safety traditionally went disproportionately to men. Perhaps there is some confounding variable which is more significant than being a male? For example, if the prior is multi-modal, the is there a reason for the two modes? As another hypothesis which fits the limited data you presented, supposed that men in US culture are supposed to be more trustworthy than women and as such have more power and control. If men break that trust, then they are punished more harshly then women, and for a longer time. That would explain the disproportionate distribution of men in jail, despite the the normal bias for men in the culture. While that is certainly a form of discrimination on the basis of sex, it's not the same sort of discrimination which made black people scared for their lives in a sundown town.