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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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The low response rate means you have garbage data which means you shouldn’t rely on anything.

Fair enough, but the way to indicate that is to talk about response rate.

Approximately 1 in 4 of 19% of a Non-Representative Sample of Women Who Responded to a Non-Representative Survey of 27 Colleges (Out of Roughly 5,000) Reported Experiencing Sexual Assault, Where “Sexual Assault” is Taken to Mean Anything from Being on the Receiving End of an Unsolicited Kiss to Forcible Penetration at Gunpoint, Regardless of the Particular Context

I bolded the parts that are actually load-bearing. The rest is Earp trying to make it look as stupid and clumsy as possible.

For example, the Times' decision to gloss "nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation" as "sexual assault" is basically journalistic malpractice. What's the minimum change necessary to report this fairly? Using the actual wording from the actual survey. This isn't good enough for Earp, whose "more accurate" version is positively contorted.

Insofar as I believe in "not paraphrasing unflatteringly," I think this is a bad thing.

It still seems like the definition of sexual assault is quite broad. But really I think you can just say “we don’t know” when you have a non representative sample just due to response rate.