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Notice the use of your word "might?" That's a clue that we're bandying around unsupported guesses. As in, "well, it might be that this, or it might be that that

Notice the use of your word "might?" That's a clue that we're bandying around unsupported guesses. As in, "well, it might be that this, or it might be that that." There's nothing wrong with that kind of talk, provided it is followed by, "And here's how we would go out and discover what the actual truth is." That is Science. Stopping with "might" is fine, provided you don't call it anything other than speculation. I'm not calling what I said anything other than speculation. I put it there to show that if you're going to make stuff up, you can arrive at any conclusion you like. So I needn't defend my suggestion. I agree it is indefensible, just as the one you're supporting is indefensible. It all comes down to either saying "I don't know and that's fine with me because I have faith," or "I don't know, and I'm going to find out what is actually true." Take your pick, but start with "I don't know."

yummyfajitas 14y ago
Let me quote the part of your post I'm disagreeing with: I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up. I took a model very similar to yours, in which women never make stuff up. The only factor I added was a (in my opinion quite reasonable) assumption that you can't harass the people in the company you've never met. I.e., I showed one can disagree with you even while believing that women never ever make stuff up. If you want to call all beliefs based on mathematical models rather than some frequentist statistical estimate "faith", fine. I don't agree that mathematical models are useless, I think they can give us excellent guesses about the world and we should use them until we have something better (particularly when a variety of different models give similar conclusions). But I suppose we just have radically different views on epistemiology. But in that case, why are you claiming that kudzu_bob's claim is "probably incorrect"? How could you possibly know this? Absent some frequentist study proving this is the case, why would you believe that "it's men doing the harassing"?

yummyfajitas 14y ago

Let me quote the part of your post I'm disagreeing with: I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up. I took a model very similar to yours, in which women never make stuff up. The only factor I added was a (in my opinion quite reasonable) assumption that you can't harass the people in the company you've never met. I.e., I showed one can disagree with you even while believing that women never ever make stuff up. If you want to call all beliefs based on mathematical models rather than some frequentist statistical estimate "faith", fine. I don't agree that mathematical models are useless, I think they can give us excellent guesses about the world and we should use them until we have something better (particularly when a variety of different models give similar conclusions). But I suppose we just have radically different views on epistemiology. But in that case, why are you claiming that kudzu_bob's claim is "probably incorrect"? How could you possibly know this? Absent some frequentist study proving this is the case, why would you believe that "it's men doing the harassing"?