7 ms·
"More Sex is Safer Sex" Paradox (Python)
- wccrawford 16y agoAs he showed, it's not a 'paradox'. Actually, it never was, since that's not what paradox means in the first place. But he did show it wasn't true at all. But even if he hadn't, it would -never- have been safer for the 'sexual conservatives'. More sex always means more risk for them, no matter the time frame.
- cheald 16y agoI suspect the proper word here would have been "phenomenon". Except it isn't.
- fjh 16y agoThe word paradox is commonly used for things that are surprising or counter-intuitive (e.g. the birthday paradox and simpson's paradox). If you consider this meaning, it makes senses to call it a paradox.
- stuaxo 16y agoHe does start with the assumption that 1/2 the promiscuous players are infected already - which seems like quite an assumption.
- inquisitor20 16y agoaint statistics grand!!! unfortunately real life never learned statistics :( stupid reality....
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- baguasquirrel 16y agoIt seems he chose the simulation parameters without any regard to what the real life numbers are. Anyone who has studied complex systems will tell you this is a big deal. In things like weather simulations, a small change in initial conditions makes for huge differences later on. In something relatively simple like this, it could mean that you are falling on one side of a differential equation or the other. I mean seriously. Half the folks who often have sex will have AIDS?
- xenophanes 16y agoYeah, agreed. Further, one can think of intuitive reasons that the conservatives having more sex might help. e.g. it lowers the chance of an STD going from a high risk person to a high risk person (which would cause it to be spread way more after). I have no idea who that makes right, I'm just saying intuitively one can think of simple reasons it might go either way and so the details definitely do matter.
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoWell, it's open-source, so there's no reason this has to be the end of the discussion. Copy his code and change a few parameters around.
- sliverstorm 16y agoPerhaps the parent could find a lower bound on the percentage of people with AIDS whereupon more sex does equal safer sex. That would certainly answer the parent's question.
- baguasquirrel 16y agoThe model itself is broken. It is doubtful the population is bimodal, divided between people who are nymphomaniacs, and people who will be satisfied once they find "the one". I just don't believe that people don't have affairs, or that prostitution doesn't exist. It is more plausible that the number sexual partners follows a Pareto distribution. It is likewise plausible that the economist sought to flatten the Pareto curve, even if this may result in the area under the curve increasing somewhat. Would it work? Maybe not. But this counterexample just reflects badly upon us. Programmers are the new physicists of this era. http://www.xkcd.com/793/ http://www.xkcd.com/793/
- philwelch 16y agoMy model didn't follow a bimodal distribution; it followed a uniform distribution. I got the same results. A Pareto distribution would be interesting to try.
- barrkel 16y agoThe key bit that this author is missing is prostitutes as the "high-activity players". If it's easier for people to get with "low-activity players", it naturally reduces the activity of the "high-activity players". Also, the "high-activity players" modeled as 1 per 10 days seems pretty low, to me. In an extremely conservative society using prostitutes as a sexual outlet for unmarried young men, I would expect rates in excess of 10 per day, not 1 per 10 days.
- xenophanes 16y agoIs STD risk with prostitutes very high? They have more sex but they also have more STD tests, more sheet-washings, more knowledge about safe sex.
- barrkel 16y agoThat's very dependent on the country, situation, wealth, etc. What are the rates among prostitutes in Saudi Arabia, for example? A quick internet scan indicates in that they are from Indonesia, Nigeria etc., and 20 or younger. With prostitution being illegal, how easily can they get STD tests? If they are being trafficked / lured in at a young age, what's their likely education level and autonomy for insisting on safe sex?
- sprout 16y agoBetter than that would be for our society to get over the stigma around STDs and STD testing. As unromantic as it is, it should be uncontroversial to ask someone for a copy of a recent STD test. Even having cards would be nice, on a purely opt-in basis. People will whine and moan about the privacy concerns, but when it comes right down to it people with untreated or untreatable STIs should not be having sex (and if they are their partners should be made aware.)
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoAsking your date for a copy of her most recent STD test is definitely a sure-fire way to avoid contracting any STDs...
- Mz 16y agoYou could always do the gentlemanly thing and offer to show her yours first...
- Clarity1992 16y ago>> people with untreated or untreatable STIs should not be having sex Why "not be having sex" and not "not be having unprotected sex"?
- sprout 16y agoBecause condoms have a measurable failure rate. Really, there's nothing wrong with them having sex - just so their partners are aware of the risk.
- nandemo 16y agoActually, it's worse than that. Herpes and HPV can be transmitted via skin not covered by the condom, so even if the condom doesn't break it doesn't necessarily prevent transmission. It only reduces the probability of transmission. Also, there are no HPV screening tests for men.
- 16y ago
- philwelch 16y agoIt's nice to see confirmation of this. I got similar results on the simulation I wrote: http://github.com/philwelch/SexSim http://github.com/philwelch/SexSim See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407984 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407984 I'll check back when I'm less busy to compare how our simulations are set up. Mine was very quick and dirty and naive, based on uniform random distributions no less, so I'm fully open to the possibility we're both wrong.
- mattmaroon 16y agoWell, there certainly are statistical problems you can't solve without math or simulations, but this isn't one of them. Landsburg is obviously wrong. You only have to think about the extremes (ie. nobody having sex at all, and everyone having sex with everyone) to see that. He also misunderstands the dating pool. It isn't as if promiscous people have a calendar and go to the bar determined to hook up with someone every 100 days, then when they're done think "that was nice, I'll do that again in 3 months." They go to the bar frequently and hook up every time they get the opportunity. Hookups with less promiscous partners don't sate their appetite or reduce at all the number of hookups they'll make later.
- robfitz 16y agoThis code refutes a claim the author didn't make. He was saying that it is in your personal best interest to convince people more sexually conservative than you to start having more sex, which reduces your individual risk. I don't remember him making any claims about the overall benefit (or lack thereof) to the population except for the admittedly misleading title of the book and example. I have no idea whether the claim he did make is true or not, but this particular program doesn't get us any closer to finding out.
- Mz 16y agoHe was saying that it is in your personal best interest to convince people more sexually conservative than you to start having more sex, which reduces your individual risk. This really doesn't sound logical to me unless the goal is to specifically talk some conservative individual into being your long-term sex partner, thus securing a source of sex with a low risk of a) bringing an infection into the equation to start with and b) exposing you at a later date due to promiscuous behavior after they start sleeping with you. Of course, that assumes you also "behave" once you have such a situation or all bets are off. (I think most cultures already place a pretty high value, at least theoretically, on such an arrangement via valuing monogamy and marriage.)
- sliverstorm 16y agoOf course, none of this changes one ironclad rule: No sex is the safest kind of sex. Not sarcastic and not that I am celibate- but if you personally really wish to avoid STD's, there is a very clear solution. Also, I'm not quite humanitarian enough to raise my personal risk exposure for the sake of lowering society's risk exposure.
- enko 16y agoI hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
- tomjen3 16y agoAnother Iron clad rule: People will have sex. So it really doesn't matter if it isn't totally safe.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoSyphilis used to be a sentence of death preceded by insanity. People still had sex.
- Avshalom 16y agoWell sure but no sex still isn't a guarantee of no STDs. A fact that is in part responsible for moving AIDS from "god's punishment for being gay" to "serious fucking problem."
- sliverstorm 16y agoThis is true, but I believe sex is still the #1 transmission vector. And if it's not, #1 is dirty needles. So by avoiding #1 and #2 (most people don't shoot heroin) you cut out the biggest risk factors.
- zaphar 16y agoOr you you could do the next best thing and only have sex with one person who also only has sex with you otherwise known as monogamy. You get the sex and the safety. Best of both worlds. The rest of the world may act harmfully but that doesn't mean you have to. If your comparing the two options of * Low risk wiser people increasing their risk and acting less wise so that high risk less wise people can have their cake and eat it to * Or High risk less wise people lowering their risk and acting more wise. I think option 2 sounds like a better if more difficult goal to shoot for.
- Clarity1992 16y agoThere's a story about G H Hardy coming across a geneticist's work and proving that recessive genes persist at an equal concentration, against the original author's claims. This article reminds me a lot of that, where an expert in another field says "let me just check that for myself, errrr!". I believe the Hardy story is told in C P Snow's foreword to A Mathematician's Apology, and the result is now well known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle
- pjscott 16y agoThis is all based on unfounded assumptions about who has sex with whom. If you make a graph in which vertices are people and two people have an edge between them if they've had sex, then the structure you actually get is surprising. Here's a real sex graph; bear in mind that this is from a high school, so the things I say in the rest of the post may not apply outside high schools and colleges: http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains_pressfigure1.jpg http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains_pressfigure1.jpg You've got a lot of two-person monogamous pairings, a smaller number of triads, scattered chains, and then this BIG, HAIRY THING that's vaguely ring-shaped. It doesn't have promiscuous hubs; you can stop the spread of STDs by trying to get as many people as possible to use condoms and get STD screening, thus breaking the chains. It's almost a spanning tree. This structure can be generated from two simple rules: 1. People tend to date other people with a similar amount of past sexual experience. 2. People avoid dating the exes of other people who are close to them in the relationship graph, since this makes them look bad to their friends, exes, and so on. This accounts for the lack of short cycles. This was theoretically confirmed by some researchers who wrote computer simulations to try to come up with similar-looking relationship graphs, and succeeded brilliantly: http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains.pdf http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/chains.pdf
- Confusion 16y agoHere's a real sex graph; It's not a sex graph: it also contains all relationships of people that were romantically involved without having sex.
- pjscott 16y agoAh, thank you: relationship graph. Still, the sex graph would probably have similar structure, unless things in high school are a lot more wild than I thought.
- iskander 16y agoThat whole school is hetero?
- 16y ago
- stevenlandsburg 16y agoThe coder has failed to grasp the assumptions, the logic, or the conclusions of the argument he thinks he's addressing. Details here: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/10/04/the-python-misinterpreter/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/10/04/the-python-misinte....