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Notes -
Russell Brand Accusations
Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).
Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.
There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.
All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,
There's been some discussion here on the "incel" phenomenon recently, with several commenters reiterating the popular claim that the reason women have such a visceral dislike of incels is because they fear being raped by them, and arguing that this fear is entirely reasonable.
I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that the available evidence points in the opposite direction: men who have numerous sexual partners, one-night stands, concurrent sexual partners, visit prostitutes etc. are more likely to commit rape or sexual assault than men who do not meet this description. In light of this evidence, Brand probably sitting in the 99th percentile for sexual partners should significantly raise our priors that he is guilty of what he is accused of. The fact that he's famously promiscuous isn't dispositive, of course, but it's highly relevant to the accusations.
Its really hard to do proper Bayesian analysis when the base rates differ by orders of magnitude between subpopulations.
What fraction of the attractive, single, 16-35 year old women Russell Brand meets in a given year want to have sex with him? 20%? I know it's a lot higher than for you or me. He simply doesn't need as many bits of evidence in order to have the same confidence level that the woman he's with consents.
The huge numbers involved lead to some interesting scenarios. If Russell Brand sleeps with 1000 women, and 998 of them are perfectly consensual, +EV experiences for both parties (I am ignoring society-wide social consequences for the moment), but 2 of them are honest misunderstandings where the woman did not actually consent, is 99.8% an unreasonably low confidence level to act upon? Human social interaction is complicated. Are you sure you'll ever be able to get it much above that? Would it even be fair to Brand and the other 998 women if we insisted on a 99.99% confidence level instead? What's the utilitarian calculus here?
You mentioned that more sexually-active men are more likely to be sexual assault perpetrators, and I totally believe that, but I do wonder what happens if you do the normalization per encounter instead of per person.
I agree, and there's also the fact that (a) most men have a partner of some kind, and (b) men who are not sexually active are - despite the presence of incels - also a population that contains many low-libido men, voluntarily celibate men etc.., who are presumably much less likely to commit acts of sexual assault. It stands to reason that sexually active men are more likely to commit sexual assault than sexually inactive men because the former tend to be more interested in sex than the latter.
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