MuffinButton
9hr ago
I think you're correct that the poll numbers are the direct lever involved, but my understanding is that just kicks what gets @WhiningCoil about the story up one level, i.e., Platner got a pass (in the polls) on all sorts of other behavior, but what mattered (in the polls) was a rape allegation. It's still a worthwhile distinction, since the relevance and valence of some issue to political higher-ups and to the voting population can differ significantly (cf. immigration), but that might only magnify the frustration.
The closest analogue I recall was a lot of people up in arms that Andrew Cuomo was pushed to resign after a series of sexual harassment allegations rather than his disastrous decision to put a bunch of COVID patients into nursing homes.
Edit: grammar
MuffinButton
18hr ago
My final paragraph was being kind. It was a description of my own (conditional) internal state, so I can verify it was true. Its necessity is left to the judgment of the reader—though I note that none of what anyone posts here is strictly necessary in the barest sense (and yet...). I do appreciate you linking the infographic, but I cannot help but point out that if it was taken down from its original source and you had to instead link the graphic as part of an article written by a radical feminist saying that it tripped her BS detector in the direction opposite her biases and is probably crap, then it's probably not worth including it at all.
Casually linking to two studies and inviting people (in this case, me) to look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology doesn't engender any particular conclusion other than that you didn't seem to have read them particularly carefully. That I had to click through to find that one of the (as-described) studies isn't a study, but instead yet another innumerate, made-up social media graph which added negative value to the discussion was, in a nutshell, the point of my post. I know the graph was made up, because Enliven did show their homework. I award them no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.
Touching briefly on the object level: I think we are in agreement on due process and presumption of innocence.
I'm not sure what the back half of your response (PBS? Upvotes? Your GitHub?) has to do with anything I said, but after reading through, I think you might be misinterpreting others' disagreement and skepticism as emotional reactions. While I can't speak to others' feelings or lack thereof, you did impute an intense emotional response to me, and I invite you to not do that again.
MuffinButton
1d ago
I have no dog in this particular fight, as I neither live in Maine nor have any plans to do so in the next six years. I am also going to leave aside the object-level concerns, as I don't think estimating general population false accusation rates clarifies much due to the numerous selection effects and atypical—at least in scale—incentives involved here. However, I do strongly object to the blithe implication of equivalent credibility you make:
About that “believe all women” streak, it’s an open question what percent of rape accusations are false rape accusations. I will list two sources with different conclusions:
- Source 1 claims 0.2% of rape accusations are false.
- Source 2 claims 28.8% of rape accusations are false.
Both sources show their homework, so people can look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology.
Source 1 shows their homework for an infographic they made (and which doesn't render for me on the archived page—possibly a skill issue), not for any of the surveys or studies providing the numbers which are used in said homework. They arrive at a 0.2% rate by multiplying a 10% reporting rate by a 2% false accusation rate. Yes, it really is just "0.1*0.02 = 0.002 = 0.2%". Where did they get those two factors?
- The 10% reporting rate is assumed based on two studies, one of which (UK, 2006) estimated a reporting rate between 5% and 25% and the other which covered two years in the US and estimated 49% (2010) and 27% (2011). I don't know how one bases an assumption of "Let's go with 10%" on those numbers, none of the linked studies are accessible via either the archive or copy-pasting the URL, and since the project which hosts the page is "a campaign to bring sexual violence out of the closet and lift survivors to their full potential", this has "just trust me bro" levels of credibility. Regardless, if God were to descend from the heavens and reveal exactly what percentage of rapes result in an accusation, it would be irrelevant to the false accusation rate, because a false accusation requires there to be an accusation in the first place.
- The 2% false accusation rate is the lower bound of an estimate (2%–8%) from what I believe is a US study from 2009 (a different year and/or country than the studies which were mostly ignored to, charitably, "estimate" the 10% reporting rate figure) hosted here by a different, but aligned, activist organization.
This is certainly one of the methodologies of all time.
Source 2 shows their homework by skewering the very survey which Source 1 used for its 2% false accusation rate, in much the same way that Scott Alexander did in 2013. Both (correctly, as we claim to grant the presumption of innocence in the relevant jurisdictions) bother accounting for inconclusive claims in the numerator and denominator, but I recommend Scott's analysis since it also grapples with selection effects regarding the non-reporting factor.
Regardless of how believable you find the analyses (Source 2 or Scott's; I wouldn't dignify Source 1 with such a characterization), they are at least operating on the level of evidence relevant to assessing accusations, whereas Source 1 is not.
If I am being overwhelmingly charitable, I would say that taking claims made by activist organizations (of any stripe) at face value is unwise, and that if you want to use them in your reasoning, the fine people at Morton have a variety of products suited to this purpose.
If I am being less- but still far from un-charitable, I would say that I suspect you read neither of those sources (particularly Source 1) and just wanted to slap up a couple numbers to make a "but who could say, really" sort of point. One of the reasons I might suspect this is that multiple others still bother to read things as well. I can't imagine that throwing out links without reading them would improve one's credibility, and while I'm just some rando who broke a decade-long streak of lurking during a coffee break, more established members like @phosphorus2 and @FCfromSSC expressing parallel sentiments should motivate exercising more care and deliberation when posting—it certainly would in me.
It might help to think of the net spending tally not as "progress", but as "a (rough) estimate of progress". There are enough significant one-off events that the error bars are likely larger than the expected savings on timescales shorter than multiple years. As I see it, you're likely to be in one of two scenarios (which one is TBD):
Either way, you're better-positioned than you would've been in the counterfactual world where you hadn't adjusted behavior, and I would concur with your gut that it is quite the win.
More options
Context Copy link