6 ms·

I didn't get the context, so I had to look it up: > What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school would wait to publicly accus

by hjek 8y ago

I didn't get the context, so I had to look it up: > What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school would wait to publicly accuse him not just 30 yrs, but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote?[0] And then the author claims that the poll is "neutral"? However, there are biased ways of asking questions.[1] A poll about the Kavanaugh hearing could also ask "What fraction of rapists are convicted?" and that would carry a different political meaning. [0]: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1041743505507405824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1041743505507405824?r... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss#/media/File:Stimmzettel-Anschluss.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss#/media/File:Stimmzet...

ryanmonroe 8y ago
Asking that question and then implying in the comments that the wording doesn't lead people to a specific conclusion is exactly the type of "bad faith" action this post purports to be against. Well, either that or the author is just very biased and very oblivious. Either way, it gives some insight into what he means by "infer indirectly from my neutral analytical text that I promote the most extreme views imaginable"
- whymauri 8y ago
  This is a prime example of someone claiming to be neutral or centrist to push their agenda while holding a falsified high ground. You see it all the time on Reddit.
  - zepto 8y ago
    You may be right, but it’s also possible that you are projecting your own bias onto what the author is doing. If you read his pieces, it’s clear that his focus is on Bayesian probability and reasoning in general. That question is interesting, because you can certainly read it as a leading question. But you can also just take it at face value. One answer might be that the fraction is likely to be close to 100%, since there is a good chance that the population is just one, and we know that she actually did. What fraction of people can tell the difference between a Bayesian economist asking a question with an uninituitive answer, and someone with a ‘falsified’ agenda to push?
dwaltrip 8y ago
It is rather disappointing that he thinks that the Twitter poll measures anything useful at all. Ignoring the overwhelming political entanglement and resulting bias (which is obviously a huge issue for the poll's integrity), there is no reason to believe the respondents have a well-informed understanding of the dynamics of when and why women report sexual assault.
- zethraeus 8y ago
  He thinks it's useful as a marketing strategy for his own work.
  - danieltrembath 8y ago
    This comment should be even higher. He never misses an opportunity to promote his books (and I don't blame him for that). But imo he's happy for a bit of controversy.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Indeed. I mean, based on available evidence, the answer is clearly ~100%. And the same if you replace "nominee for Supreme Court" with "huge and hugely contentious notoriety". Also, if it occurred ~30 years ago, I suspect that most victims would have pretty much forgotten about it. Until they got reminded by seeing him in the news.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Let's see. Thirty years ago is Dec 1989. I remember more or less how many sexual partners that I had that year. I remember the name of the one who I married. Plus a few others. Some, I never knew their names. What can I say, I was promiscuous. In particular, I never knew the name of the guy who pulled a knife, while we were flirting, and threatened to rape me. Also, I don't remember the name of the woman who attempted suicide. After I got tired of waiting for a sexual relationship, and found someone else. With whom, by the way, I visited her in hospital, until she was discharged. And I never knew the name of the guy who beat the shit out of me in a park, after I'd insulted him. I could go on. But the point is that most people arguably don't keep grudges for decades. And yes, maybe it's just that I'm a guy. And maybe rape is just so much worse that victims do keep grudges for decades. Also, I admit that the "based on available evidence" argument is iffy. Because we only know about cases that involve notorious perpetrators. Maybe one could use FOIA to get relevant aggregate data from police. It'd be a decent thesis topic, perhaps.
namuol 8y ago
Relevant: "This Video Will Make You Angry" (CGP Grey) https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
- hjek 8y ago
  Not sure I understand, sorry. In what way is this video relevant? It seems to suggest that spread of anger is always a bad thing, so are you suggesting that we should dismiss the concerns of angry people?
  - namuol 8y ago
    I'm suggesting we should be wary of inflammatory/controversial, trending content. Usually the attention content receives is proportional to how polarizing it is, not how nuanced or important it is. This is a legitimate problem, and the video does a better job explaining it than I could, which is why I linked it in this thread.
jccalhoun 8y ago
Yes. His claims that he has "not made moral, value, or political claims" in his inflammatory posts" and that he has written a "neutral analytical text" are silly.
a1369209993 8y ago
> wait to publicly accuse him not just 30 yrs, but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote? Honestly that sounds like at least a local maximum (and given law enforcement for sexual assault 30 years ago, possibly a global maximum) in terms of "When is the best time to make this accusation in order to maximize the harm to the person who hurt me?", particularly if you know that there isn't enough evidence to get a conviction.
lukev 8y ago
This is a good point. It is true in life and particularly true on twitter that you don't get to ask questions without people imputing a motive. Frankly, it does sound here like he is (at best) uninformed about the emotional experience of sexual assault survivors (irrelevant to the specific case of Dr. Ford), or at worst a partisan hack. He should spend less time publicly digging into the motivations of those he has "offended" and more time introspecting on whether he is actually in fact a being of pure logic who can perceive all from a position completely uninfluenced by his personal history and experience.
- weaksauce 8y ago
  > uninformed about the emotional experience of sexual assault survivors (irrelevant to the specific case of Dr. Ford) She stated that she was pretty emotionally torn up because of that attempt for many years after the event. I'm not sure how an attempted rape is irrelevant to her emotional well being. an attempted mugging is nearly as emotionally draining as a successful one I'd wager... there is still a violation in trust there.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- zepto 8y ago
  What do you think the motivations of the people he has offended actually are?
  - lukev 8y ago
    I'm quite certain that (correctly or incorrectly) the perception was that he was engaging in bad-faith rhetoric: "just asking questions" or similar. Like it or not, you can't just transparently "ask a question" on Twitter. Even Robin admits in the original post to not being transparent about his motives when conducting twitter polls. Add in the fact that 95% of everything on Twitter is already posturing or naked assertions and it's not surprising that people reacted badly. The priors for a given tweet being a good-faith effort at discourse are very very poor, and his tone/style was doing him no favors.
bcgraham 8y ago
I know this is a sensitive topic, but just for consideration: when I asked my wife this question, she answered, "Almost everyone." She thought that answer was so obvious it might be trying to lead people to that answer. If you read the question with an open mind, I think any bias it has is up for debate.
amazingman 8y ago
It’s just a poll question. I personally think the answer is probably a high percentage, given the power dynamics and also what happened with Anita Hill.
mikekchar 8y ago
It took me a ridiculously long time to even parse this question. "What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school..." I got to this bit and thought, "How many women are assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school? It can't be that many. Is it even reasonable to ask for a fraction? Is it meaningful?" I mean it's ludicrous to put up a "<1%" option as it implies that there were more than 100 women assaulted by a nominee for the Supreme Court in high school. Is that option justifiable? I find it really interesting that 65% of the respondents selected it, because it implies to me that they didn't understand the question. And then "would wait to publicly accuse him not just [after?] 30 yrs" So I thought, "How many nominees for Supreme Court are in high school? If I'm going to publicly accuse a nominee for Supreme Court for assaulting me in high school (assuming we were both in high school at the time), don't I have to wait 30 years? Otherwise I'll never know they were a nominee for the Supreme Court." -- which is a weird way of thinking about it. This word "wait" is particularly problematic. You can't know a priori that the attacker will be a nominee for the Supreme Court, so you can't really wait to accuse them on that basis. The best you can really say is "After not accusing their attacker for 30 years, would they accuse them after they were nominated to the supreme court?" (which might be an interesting question to ask) The last part "but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote" didn't make grammatical sense to me. Granted I know nothing about the original context of the question, but presumably the hearing and vote are related to the appointment of the nominee. So I suppose the question the author wanted to ask is, would the accuser wait until after the hearings, but before the vote? However, this is really compressing the options. There are really 5 potential times to accuse the attacker: some time after the attack but before the nomination, between the nomination and the vote, after the vote, and never. Surely a much better question to ask would be "Which of these potential timings seems more likely to occur to you". This question is so badly written that I have a really hard time believing that it was written by someone who makes their living doing statistical analysis about people's perceptions. I've read the author's comment on it, but if they are defending this question (and I'm not 100% sure that they are), then I don't really think I need to look at their larger corpus. I think I can happily conclude that if they are not just trying to be a shit disturber then they are incredibly incompetent. I'm not sure which of the two labels they would rather be stuck with.
- 8y ago

by hjek 8y ago

ryanmonroe 8y ago

Asking that question and then implying in the comments that the wording doesn't lead people to a specific conclusion is exactly the type of "bad faith" action this post purports to be against. Well, either that or the author is just very biased and very oblivious. Either way, it gives some insight into what he means by "infer indirectly from my neutral analytical text that I promote the most extreme views imaginable"

whymauri 8y ago
This is a prime example of someone claiming to be neutral or centrist to push their agenda while holding a falsified high ground. You see it all the time on Reddit.
- zepto 8y ago
  You may be right, but it’s also possible that you are projecting your own bias onto what the author is doing. If you read his pieces, it’s clear that his focus is on Bayesian probability and reasoning in general. That question is interesting, because you can certainly read it as a leading question. But you can also just take it at face value. One answer might be that the fraction is likely to be close to 100%, since there is a good chance that the population is just one, and we know that she actually did. What fraction of people can tell the difference between a Bayesian economist asking a question with an uninituitive answer, and someone with a ‘falsified’ agenda to push?

dwaltrip 8y ago

It is rather disappointing that he thinks that the Twitter poll measures anything useful at all. Ignoring the overwhelming political entanglement and resulting bias (which is obviously a huge issue for the poll's integrity), there is no reason to believe the respondents have a well-informed understanding of the dynamics of when and why women report sexual assault.

zethraeus 8y ago
He thinks it's useful as a marketing strategy for his own work.
- danieltrembath 8y ago
  This comment should be even higher. He never misses an opportunity to promote his books (and I don't blame him for that). But imo he's happy for a bit of controversy.
mirimir 8y ago
Indeed. I mean, based on available evidence, the answer is clearly ~100%. And the same if you replace "nominee for Supreme Court" with "huge and hugely contentious notoriety". Also, if it occurred ~30 years ago, I suspect that most victims would have pretty much forgotten about it. Until they got reminded by seeing him in the news.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Let's see. Thirty years ago is Dec 1989. I remember more or less how many sexual partners that I had that year. I remember the name of the one who I married. Plus a few others. Some, I never knew their names. What can I say, I was promiscuous. In particular, I never knew the name of the guy who pulled a knife, while we were flirting, and threatened to rape me. Also, I don't remember the name of the woman who attempted suicide. After I got tired of waiting for a sexual relationship, and found someone else. With whom, by the way, I visited her in hospital, until she was discharged. And I never knew the name of the guy who beat the shit out of me in a park, after I'd insulted him. I could go on. But the point is that most people arguably don't keep grudges for decades. And yes, maybe it's just that I'm a guy. And maybe rape is just so much worse that victims do keep grudges for decades. Also, I admit that the "based on available evidence" argument is iffy. Because we only know about cases that involve notorious perpetrators. Maybe one could use FOIA to get relevant aggregate data from police. It'd be a decent thesis topic, perhaps.

namuol 8y ago

Relevant: "This Video Will Make You Angry" (CGP Grey) https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc

hjek 8y ago
Not sure I understand, sorry. In what way is this video relevant? It seems to suggest that spread of anger is always a bad thing, so are you suggesting that we should dismiss the concerns of angry people?
- namuol 8y ago
  I'm suggesting we should be wary of inflammatory/controversial, trending content. Usually the attention content receives is proportional to how polarizing it is, not how nuanced or important it is. This is a legitimate problem, and the video does a better job explaining it than I could, which is why I linked it in this thread.

jccalhoun 8y ago

Yes. His claims that he has "not made moral, value, or political claims" in his inflammatory posts" and that he has written a "neutral analytical text" are silly.

a1369209993 8y ago

> wait to publicly accuse him not just 30 yrs, but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote? Honestly that sounds like at least a local maximum (and given law enforcement for sexual assault 30 years ago, possibly a global maximum) in terms of "When is the best time to make this accusation in order to maximize the harm to the person who hurt me?", particularly if you know that there isn't enough evidence to get a conviction.

lukev 8y ago

This is a good point. It is true in life and particularly true on twitter that you don't get to ask questions without people imputing a motive. Frankly, it does sound here like he is (at best) uninformed about the emotional experience of sexual assault survivors (irrelevant to the specific case of Dr. Ford), or at worst a partisan hack. He should spend less time publicly digging into the motivations of those he has "offended" and more time introspecting on whether he is actually in fact a being of pure logic who can perceive all from a position completely uninfluenced by his personal history and experience.

weaksauce 8y ago
> uninformed about the emotional experience of sexual assault survivors (irrelevant to the specific case of Dr. Ford) She stated that she was pretty emotionally torn up because of that attempt for many years after the event. I'm not sure how an attempted rape is irrelevant to her emotional well being. an attempted mugging is nearly as emotionally draining as a successful one I'd wager... there is still a violation in trust there.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zepto 8y ago
What do you think the motivations of the people he has offended actually are?
- lukev 8y ago
  I'm quite certain that (correctly or incorrectly) the perception was that he was engaging in bad-faith rhetoric: "just asking questions" or similar. Like it or not, you can't just transparently "ask a question" on Twitter. Even Robin admits in the original post to not being transparent about his motives when conducting twitter polls. Add in the fact that 95% of everything on Twitter is already posturing or naked assertions and it's not surprising that people reacted badly. The priors for a given tweet being a good-faith effort at discourse are very very poor, and his tone/style was doing him no favors.

bcgraham 8y ago

I know this is a sensitive topic, but just for consideration: when I asked my wife this question, she answered, "Almost everyone." She thought that answer was so obvious it might be trying to lead people to that answer. If you read the question with an open mind, I think any bias it has is up for debate.

amazingman 8y ago

It’s just a poll question. I personally think the answer is probably a high percentage, given the power dynamics and also what happened with Anita Hill.

mikekchar 8y ago

It took me a ridiculously long time to even parse this question. "What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school..." I got to this bit and thought, "How many women are assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school? It can't be that many. Is it even reasonable to ask for a fraction? Is it meaningful?" I mean it's ludicrous to put up a "<1%" option as it implies that there were more than 100 women assaulted by a nominee for the Supreme Court in high school. Is that option justifiable? I find it really interesting that 65% of the respondents selected it, because it implies to me that they didn't understand the question. And then "would wait to publicly accuse him not just [after?] 30 yrs" So I thought, "How many nominees for Supreme Court are in high school? If I'm going to publicly accuse a nominee for Supreme Court for assaulting me in high school (assuming we were both in high school at the time), don't I have to wait 30 years? Otherwise I'll never know they were a nominee for the Supreme Court." -- which is a weird way of thinking about it. This word "wait" is particularly problematic. You can't know a priori that the attacker will be a nominee for the Supreme Court, so you can't really wait to accuse them on that basis. The best you can really say is "After not accusing their attacker for 30 years, would they accuse them after they were nominated to the supreme court?" (which might be an interesting question to ask) The last part "but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote" didn't make grammatical sense to me. Granted I know nothing about the original context of the question, but presumably the hearing and vote are related to the appointment of the nominee. So I suppose the question the author wanted to ask is, would the accuser wait until after the hearings, but before the vote? However, this is really compressing the options. There are really 5 potential times to accuse the attacker: some time after the attack but before the nomination, between the nomination and the vote, after the vote, and never. Surely a much better question to ask would be "Which of these potential timings seems more likely to occur to you". This question is so badly written that I have a really hard time believing that it was written by someone who makes their living doing statistical analysis about people's perceptions. I've read the author's comment on it, but if they are defending this question (and I'm not 100% sure that they are), then I don't really think I need to look at their larger corpus. I think I can happily conclude that if they are not just trying to be a shit disturber then they are incredibly incompetent. I'm not sure which of the two labels they would rather be stuck with.

8y ago