{"id":18383,"date":"2014-02-24T18:19:32","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T02:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18383"},"modified":"2014-02-24T18:40:41","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T02:40:41","slug":"no-men-arent-more-likely-to-be-hit-by-an-asteroid-than-falsely-accused-of-rape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18383","title":{"rendered":"No, men aren&#8217;t more likely to be hit by an asteroid than falsely accused of rape"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/denverjeffrey\/5127461602\/player\/\" width=\"500\" height=\"267\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>So this article &#8211; &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/charlesclymer\/5-things-more-likely-to-happen-to-you-than-being-f-fmeu\">5 Things More Likely To Happen To You Than Being Falsely Accused Of Rape<\/a>&#8221; &#8211; has apparently been reblogged or liked more than 35,000 times on Tumblr. I&#8217;m not sure how big that is by Tumblr standards, by by bloggy standards it&#8217;s huge.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also completely wrong, as <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2014\/02\/17\/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E\/\">Scott at Slate Star Codex points out<\/a>, because &#8211; aside from all the other problems with measuring something like &#8220;false rape accusations&#8221; accurately, or for that matter <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skepticink.com\/ts\/2014\/02\/22\/look-up-in-the-sky\/\">the odds of lotteries or of errant space rocks<\/a> &#8211; the author of the post calculated the odds of being falsely accused <em>for any one sexual encounter<\/em> and compared that to odds of other events happening <em>ever during a lifetime<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p>But of course, that&#8217;s nonsense &#8211; for the comparison to be valid, the writer would have had to compare <em>lifetime <\/em>odds of a false rape accusation to <em>lifetime <\/em>odds of (being hit with a meteorite, playing in the NFL, etc).<\/p>\n<p>The author of the post, <a href=\"http:\/\/charlesclymer.blogspot.com\/2014\/01\/men-are-32x-more-likely-to-be-killed-by.html\">Charles Clymer<\/a>, hasn&#8217;t responded to Scott yet. But I don&#8217;t see any way Clymer&#8217;s apples-to-oranges method can be logically justified.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s notable here is not that a blogger messed up his statistics (mistakes happen), but that 35,000 folks liked or reblogged his mistake, and I think it&#8217;s fair to guess that very few of them looked skeptically at the claim and wondered &#8220;is this true?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Scott blames it on big bad feminism:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Do not trust anything that comes out of the feminist blogosphere. When you see something in the feminist blogosphere, your default assumption should be that it is approximately as honest as this Clymer article.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In comments <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2014\/02\/17\/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E\/\">at his blog<\/a> (where there&#8217;s a fair amount of debate between Scott and I), I responded:<\/p>\n<p>This is so hyperbolic that I suspect it\u2019s actually harmful, as it encourages either team rallying (\u201cdamn straight, feminists are all liars!\u201d) or defensiveness (\u201canti-feminist insults\u201d) instead of thought.<\/p>\n<p>I do think that you\u2019re talking about a real phenomenon, but it\u2019s not at all limited to the feminist blogosphere (nor is it as universal in the feminist blogosphere as you imply). If you see more than the usual number of bad stats in the feminist blogosphere, that is probably because your own interests lead you to look more for those bad stats than for bad stats in (say) gun blogs (both sides), climate change skepticism blogs, anti-evolution blogs, truther blogs, tea party blogs, etc..<\/p>\n<p>That said, I don\u2019t disagree with you that it\u2019s all-too-common for feminists to accept false statistics as long as those statistics align with our confirmation biases. I think this is a more severe problem on the internet, and probably most severe on Tumblr and similar social media. But I\u2019ve also observed the same problem with offline feminism, including some <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/27\/response-to-christina-hoff-sommers-part-3-truths-and-lies\/\">feminist academics<\/a>, which is pretty shameful.<\/p>\n<p>I think a lot of this comes from the culture of contempt that dominates contemporary politics (I can\u2019t say if it dominated politics in the past). The more we view people who disagree with us as irredeemably evil and acting out of bad motives, the more difficult it becomes for any criticism to seem credible enough to take seriously. This makes it extremely unlikely that bad statistics will be caught and discredited within a movement, even if the mistakes are pointed out by outsiders.<\/p>\n<p>Treating this as something especially unique and toxic within feminism is a mistake, I think, not only because I\u2019m a feminist, but because it\u2019s a misdiagnosis. The tendency I\u2019m talking about is happening throughout our political culture, among feminists and anti-feminists, liberals and conservatives, etc etc. An analysis that singles out feminists as extra-evil-demagogues is an analysis that is wrong about reality and thus unlikely to offer any good solutions.<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p>Related post: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jefftk.com\/p\/are-feminist-blog-stats-atypically-bad\">Are Feminist Blog Stats Atypically Bad?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So this article &#8211; &#8220;5 Things More Likely To Happen To You Than Being Falsely Accused Of Rape&#8221; &#8211; has apparently been reblogged or liked more than 35,000 times on Tumblr. I&#8217;m not sure how big that is by Tumblr &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18383\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18388,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18383\/revisions\/18388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}