The NationStates Feminist Thread III

[Chestaan]

One of the issues I have with the believe her thing is that statistics with regard to "false rape claims" are often trotted out. I've seen numbers like only 1% or 2% of all rape claims are false.

But how do we know? Then I saw that the number came from the fact that that was the percentage of claims that were either withdrawn or proven to be untrue, which is obviously not the entire number. Many rape claims don't even make it to the authorities, and so, false or not, are not counted. It is also likely that some cases which were not withdrawn or proven to be untrue were false claims but were not proven to be so.

Basically, its the equivalent of someone saying that only x% of rape claims are true, because those were the ones that were proven to be true. Its equally as wrong and equally as baffling as how otherwise intelligent people run with this statistic.

[Fahran]

One of the issues I have with the believe her thing is that statistics with regard to "false rape claims" are often trotted out. I've seen numbers like only 1% or 2% of all rape claims are false.

The numbers are actually a bit higher than that and, anyhow, it's fallacious to apply general statistics to a specific case in the manner that some have attempted. Ninety percent of people might be heterosexual but that does not mean that in talking to a particular person you have not stumbled onto someone who is gay or bisexual. It's the same with an accused person. So, essentially, even if we grant the basic presumptions behind the argument, it's still a bad argument.

[Galloism]

One of the issues I have with the believe her thing is that statistics with regard to "false rape claims" are often trotted out. I've seen numbers like only 1% or 2% of all rape claims are false.

The numbers are actually a bit higher than that and, anyhow, it's fallacious to apply general statistics to a specific case in the manner that some have attempted. Ninety percent of people might be heterosexual but that does not mean that in talking to a particular person you have not stumbled onto someone who is gay or bisexual. It's the same with an accused person. So, essentially, even if we grant the basic presumptions behind the argument, it's still a bad argument.

I mean, in any crime, if I was sitting on a jury, and I felt there was a 2% chance the person didn't do the crime, you know what I would call that?

[Proctopeo]

The numbers are actually a bit higher than that and, anyhow, it's fallacious to apply general statistics to a specific case in the manner that some have attempted. Ninety percent of people might be heterosexual but that does not mean that in talking to a particular person you have not stumbled onto someone who is gay or bisexual. It's the same with an accused person. So, essentially, even if we grant the basic presumptions behind the argument, it's still a bad argument.

I mean, in any crime, if I was sitting on a jury, and I felt there was a 2% chance the person didn't do the crime, you know what I would call that?

Reasonable doubt?

[Fahran]

Reasonable doubt?

Absolutely. And, again, the percentage of falsely accused is higher in both the US and UK.

[Chestaan]

The numbers are actually a bit higher than that and, anyhow, it's fallacious to apply general statistics to a specific case in the manner that some have attempted. Ninety percent of people might be heterosexual but that does not mean that in talking to a particular person you have not stumbled onto someone who is gay or bisexual. It's the same with an accused person. So, essentially, even if we grant the basic presumptions behind the argument, it's still a bad argument.

I mean, in any crime, if I was sitting on a jury, and I felt there was a 2% chance the person didn't do the crime, you know what I would call that?

Absolutely, you're right. But even outside of a courtroom context, it's such a bad, and wrong, statistic. And its not hard to see, for anyone, that to accurately get such a statistic would be near impossible. Yet people still parrot this stat. I don't get it.

[Hirota]

One of the issues I have with the believe her thing is that statistics with regard to "false rape claims" are often trotted out. I've seen numbers like only 1% or 2% of all rape claims are false.

But how do we know? Then I saw that the number came from the fact that that was the percentage of claims that were either withdrawn or proven to be untrue, which is obviously not the entire number. Many rape claims don't even make it to the authorities, and so, false or not, are not counted. It is also likely that some cases which were not withdrawn or proven to be untrue were false claims but were not proven to be so.

Basically, its the equivalent of someone saying that only x% of rape claims are true, because those were the ones that were proven to be true. Its equally as wrong and equally as baffling as how otherwise intelligent people run with this statistic.

It's part of the fundamental human experience that if there are two people involved, there will be three different versions of events. And it's the same when it comes to interactions of a sexual nature.

When human interactions are so vague, it's a poor starting point for attempting to measure something as complex as rape and the aggregate accuracy of complaints and to attempt to place them in a a binary of innocence and guilt.

Rape is an incredibly serious crime, one that the justice system struggles to handle and one that incites emotion on any number of levels. It's why there can be so many wide variations for what is and isn't rape, what is and isn't a "false accusation" and why attempts to codify complex human interactions into numbers will be inaccurate.

[Galloism]

Reasonable doubt?

Absolutely. And, again, the percentage of falsely accused is higher in both the US and UK.

It's also worth noting we have a "one to many" scenario in a lot of cases. This is why statistics is super hard.

IE, one serial rapist can rape multiple people and therefore appear 5, 10, 20 times in the statistics even though they are only one person, and even though single rapists may only appear once.

When it comes to false accusations, you get much the same result. There's plenty of cases of "one to many" scenarios where a single person has accused multiple people of rape over time (in fact, those usually wind up being the ones actually charged, because they do it enough the police finally get fed up with their shit). So they can up the number of false accusations more than their population if that makes sense.

So it's hard to generalize occurences to populations.

[Costa Fierro]

But how do we know?

We don't. Wikipedia says that because different studies have different criteria for what a false accusation is, the true rate may not be known. One study by the Home Office in the United Kingdom used two different criteria, and found percentages of 8% and 2.5% of cases pertaining to rape and other sexual assault being false.

[Suhkkot]

I believe that the power of not entertaining people isn't used enough.

The False Rape panic is unfounded, we have extensive psychological knowledge on how to tell apart a false report from a true one, it is a strawman by people who hate women, period.

[Galloism]

we have extensive psychological knowledge on how to tell apart a false report from a true one

We do? Please share.

[Suhkkot]

we have extensive psychological knowledge on how to tell apart a false report from a true one

We do? Please share.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... llegations
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 0701770286
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5775371/

Let me introduce myself, I'm an abnormal psychology student, I'm going for my PhD in the field. I certainly do not agree with all aspects of feminism, but the Brett Kavanaugh case has disgusted me to my core. I believe Dr. Ford was denied justice. I believe she is telling the truth.

[Galloism]

We do? Please share.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... llegations
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 0701770286
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5775371/

Let me introduce myself, I'm an abnormal psychology student, I'm going for my PhD in the field. I certainly do not agree with all aspects of feminism, but the Brett Kavanaugh case has disgusted me to my core. I believe Dr. Ford was denied justice. I believe she is telling the truth.

The first gives reasons for delayed reporting, etc, which is all true, but has no information on how to tell a false report from a true one.

The second study (at least reading the abstract), I'm not sure what it's studying. Do you have a full copy available to the public? This, in particular, is unclear:

The two categories of false allegation both contained more rape myths than the true allegations but no differences were found between the generated and withdrawn false allegations.

The third one discusses motives of false rape allegations, which is interesting in of itself, but their selection method does not help us to suss out a false report from a true one.

False allegations of rape were defined as deliberate fabrications of rape while the complainant was not raped. A case was added to the sample of false allegations if the complainant retracted the allegation and said that the allegation was, in fact, false and no rape whatsoever had occurred. Also, the alternative scenario had to be supported by corroborative and conclusive evidence. Thus, a retraction was the first and necessary step, the second step was a thorough investigation to proof that the allegation was false, and the third step was evidence of what truly happened which corroborated the retraction or confession of the complainant. For instance, a complainant said that she was raped in an alley.

Also, how do you square using psychology to determine what's true or false, given what we've learned about memory in recent years? A person can be very convincing, very positive, and wrong, because memory just doesn't work the way that anyone assumes.

I believe Ford was telling the truth as she remembered it too. That's my gut reaction. But I also know how memory works, and a LOT of time has passed. It's easy for the details to fade and even be replaced by details that aren't original information - like location, time, and who was involved.

[Suhkkot]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... llegations
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 0701770286
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5775371/

Let me introduce myself, I'm an abnormal psychology student, I'm going for my PhD in the field. I certainly do not agree with all aspects of feminism, but the Brett Kavanaugh case has disgusted me to my core. I believe Dr. Ford was denied justice. I believe she is telling the truth.

The first gives reasons for delayed reporting, etc, which is all true, but has no information on how to tell a false report from a true one.

The second study (at least reading the abstract), I'm not sure what it's studying. Do you have a full copy available to the public? This, in particular, is unclear:

The two categories of false allegation both contained more rape myths than the true allegations but no differences were found between the generated and withdrawn false allegations.

The third one discusses motives of false rape allegations, which is interesting in of itself, but their selection method does not help us to suss out a false report from a true one.

False allegations of rape were defined as deliberate fabrications of rape while the complainant was not raped. A case was added to the sample of false allegations if the complainant retracted the allegation and said that the allegation was, in fact, false and no rape whatsoever had occurred. Also, the alternative scenario had to be supported by corroborative and conclusive evidence. Thus, a retraction was the first and necessary step, the second step was a thorough investigation to proof that the allegation was false, and the third step was evidence of what truly happened which corroborated the retraction or confession of the complainant. For instance, a complainant said that she was raped in an alley.

Also, how do you square using psychology to determine what's true or false, given what we've learned about memory in recent years? A person can be very convincing, very positive, and wrong, because memory just doesn't work the way that anyone assumes.

I believe Ford was telling the truth as she remembered it too. That's my gut reaction. But I also know how memory works, and a LOT of time has passed. It's easy for the details to fade and even be replaced by details that aren't original information - like location, time, and who was involved.

Well, I do not have a degree, but consider that Ford either made complete affirmations of events or admitted that she did not recall an event. If I recall, false rape accusations are full of "I think"s.

Let me get back to you on the second study.

[Galloism]

The first gives reasons for delayed reporting, etc, which is all true, but has no information on how to tell a false report from a true one.

The second study (at least reading the abstract), I'm not sure what it's studying. Do you have a full copy available to the public? This, in particular, is unclear:



The third one discusses motives of false rape allegations, which is interesting in of itself, but their selection method does not help us to suss out a false report from a true one.



Also, how do you square using psychology to determine what's true or false, given what we've learned about memory in recent years? A person can be very convincing, very positive, and wrong, because memory just doesn't work the way that anyone assumes.

I believe Ford was telling the truth as she remembered it too. That's my gut reaction. But I also know how memory works, and a LOT of time has passed. It's easy for the details to fade and even be replaced by details that aren't original information - like location, time, and who was involved.

Well, I do not have a degree, but consider that Ford either made complete affirmations of events or admitted that she did not recall an event. If I recall, false rape accusations are full of "I think"s.

Let me get back to you on the second study.

If I recall, false rape accusations are full of "I think"s

Actually, this isn't true. It's just not the way memory works.

In one of our studies, where US soldiers were subjected to "enhanced interrogation" to build resistance to torture. This is a very psychologically stressful event. Probably equivalent to being a victim of a serious violent crime. And yet, when fed just a hint of false information - they identified the wrong interrogator 84% of the time, and were absolutely positive it was him. The person they identified wasn't even in the room during the interrogation at any point.

Memory just doesn't work the way people assume. You can be very positive, remember it as clear as day, and it be wrong. And this false information doesn't even have to be deliberate. They did it deliberately, but the false information provider doesn't have to.

[Hirota]

oh good, we are at the point where someone tries to use their dubious credentials in the field of glorified snake oil to try and justify "belief" that person x is somehow more legitimate than person y and baselessly assert that everyone who doesn't agree with their belief somehow supposedly hates women.

What a stupid position to take.

[Tahar Joblis]

One of the issues I have with the believe her thing is that statistics with regard to "false rape claims" are often trotted out. I've seen numbers like only 1% or 2% of all rape claims are false.

But how do we know? Then I saw that the number came from the fact that that was the percentage of claims that were either withdrawn or proven to be untrue, which is obviously not the entire number. Many rape claims don't even make it to the authorities, and so, false or not, are not counted. It is also likely that some cases which were not withdrawn or proven to be untrue were false claims but were not proven to be so.

Basically, its the equivalent of someone saying that only x% of rape claims are true, because those were the ones that were proven to be true. Its equally as wrong and equally as baffling as how otherwise intelligent people run with this statistic.

Nobody dropped the correct overview of the literature on this, so I will. The go-to source for work published prior to 2006 is Rumney (2006) "False allegations of rape."
Here's a basic overview.

In 1968, the first major study on the topic was carried out by interviewing the Philadelphia police department. The police department was the opinion that most claims of rape were false.

In a 1975 book called Against Our Will, feminist author Susan Brownmiller claimed that only 2% of accusations of rape are false. She did so on the basis of a speech made by a judge in New York City. Details.

Subsequently, this figure was woozled into the status of accepted fact by feminist citation, on the basis of Brownmiller's book, i.e., basically all citations of the 2% figure up to a certain point (the law review article above was published in 2000) come down to Brownmiller indirectly or directly as a source.


In the mean time, the FBI was keeping track of how many accusations of crime were deemed "unfounded" by police. Up to this point, for rape, the unfounding rate for rape was 8-20%, and the unfounding rate for other crimes was 2-4%. "Unfounded" means the police believe there is no evidence to support the accusation and they can dustbin the case; it does not mean the accusation is false per se. For UK, the equivalent term is "no-crime."

The fact that the unfounding rate / no-crime rate for rape was higher than 2% was a matter of great concern for feminists, and they lobbied extensively to pressure police departments to bring this rate down, particularly in Philadelphia (due to the skepticism towards rape accusations exhibited in the Philly police study of 1968).

In 1994, Eugene Kanin, a sociologist with a long history of research on sexual violence, published a landmark study; examining about a decade of rape complaints in a Midwestern town where the police department polygraphed all accusers and suspects and pursued every complaint of rape diligently to the end (in contrast to Philadelphia), he found that 41% of accusations led to eventual recantation by the accuser. Three years of complaints filed to university police, similarly, led to a 50% eventual recantation rate (with no polygraph usage involved). That is to say, almost half of all allegations of rape were false.

Contextually, he was working in an area with a low crime rate, so a high rate of false accusation isn't really as remarkable as it seems at first glance.

This paper kicked up a firestorm. Contemporary figures released by the federal government showed an 8% unfounding rate for rape overall, and an overview of evidence submitted to DNA labs for this new "DNA testing" thing showed that in 20% of cases, the DNA evidence was unusable, and in 20% of cases (i.e., 25% of cases where DNA evidence was usable) the primary suspect was excluded, i.e., the accusation had been materially false.

Feminists redoubled pressure on police departments to reduce the unfounding rate. Feminist scholars began to carry out research based on Kanin's model, with an aim of classifying as false only accusations proven to be false, e.g., Lisak 2010.

Frequently, this meant starting with the designation of "false" by police and narrowing it further. Kelly (2005), who takes the 9% of accusations designated false by police and applies tighter standards to reduce this figure to 3%.

There is a circularity between the activism and scholarship in this - feminist activists pressured police departments to lower the rate at which they classified allegations of rape as false or unfounded and to narrow their definitions of "false accusation" for rape as a point of policy, and then feminist scholars used those reduced rates to claim low rates of false accusation. In some cases, those unfounding rates have reached as low as the desired feminist talking point of 2%.

On the other end of the spectrum, Roman et. al. (2012) at the Urban Institute, specifically studying false conviction using DNA evidence, support an estimate of 8-15% for not the wrongful accusation rate, but the wrongful conviction rate prior to the widespread use of DNA evidence, for rape and murder pooled together.

So here's what we know.

• The 2% figure is basically a lie. It was not based on any particularly good evidence to start with, and no figure approaching 2% can be supported as anything but the result of ideological pressure by feminists to pretend that almost all accusations of rape are true.
• About 10% of accusations can be proven false to general satisfaction... give or take half an order of magnitude.
• Also about 10% of accusations - also give or take half an order of magnitude - are unfounded with no evidence.
• Not terribly many more accusations than that are proven true, i.e., lead to convictions.
• Of those accusations where there is DNA evidence proving that a woman had sex with a man, 25% are disproven by DNA test. In some cases, the falsehood may be malicious, in others accidental (eyewitness misidentification). In some of the remaining 75% of cases, the issue may be consent rather than whether or not sex happened.
• In cases pre-dating DNA evidence, as many of 8-15% of those convicted are innocent... which, if the justice system is working at all, implies that the rate of false accusation is significantly higher.

The working definition of "false definition" used by feminist researchers is not "is factually false," but rather "proven false beyond a reasonable doubt." Thus, when comparing Lisak (2010)'s figure of 8 accusations, the relevant number of remaining "true" cases are not the 128 other accusations, but a subset of the pool of 48 "proceeded" cases (prosecuted or resulting in university sanctions) leading to a subsequent determination of guilty.

Using a typical mid-1990s ratio (8% false vs 12% leading to conviction) gives a ballpark of 40% (roughly the same as Kanin's 1994 figures).

It's very likely that at least 10% of allegations of rape are completely fabricated, and that at least 20% of allegations of rape are materially false.

It's not less likely, given the body of available evidence, that 50% of allegations are materially false than that less than 10% of allegations are materially false.

[Suhkkot]

oh good, we are at the point where someone tries to use their dubious credentials in the field of glorified snake oil to try and justify "belief" that person x is somehow more legitimate than person y and baselessly assert that everyone who doesn't agree with their belief somehow supposedly hates women.

What a stupid position to take.

And what a vitriolic attitude.

I said I had no credentials too.

[Tahar Joblis]

oh good, we are at the point where someone tries to use their dubious credentials in the field of glorified snake oil to try and justify "belief" that person x is somehow more legitimate than person y and baselessly assert that everyone who doesn't agree with their belief somehow supposedly hates women.

What a stupid position to take.

Abnormal psych isn't a field of glorified snake oil.

It is true, by the way, that Ford's accusation does not fit the profile of a "false accusation" per Kanin (1994)'s exploration of the motives leading to false accusation. (Which, in spite of the fact that Kanin (1994) is widely viewed as discredited by feminists for the purpose of examining the rate of false accusation, is basically still the major work in exploring the motives for false accusation.)

However, the profile of her accusation does fit the profile of the construction of false memory, in particular the fact that it emerged in therapy decades later. I would take the fact that her friend Leland Keyser does not recall the party and, more importantly, did not know Kavanaugh at all, as an indication that the memory recalled by Ford contains at least some material inaccuracies. The differences between the therapist's notes and Ford's account

The memory could be completely constructed, or it could include some elements that are based on a real event and some elements that were subsequently constructed in therapy.

[Hirota]

oh good, we are at the point where someone tries to use their dubious credentials in the field of glorified snake oil to try and justify "belief" that person x is somehow more legitimate than person y and baselessly assert that everyone who doesn't agree with their belief somehow supposedly hates women.

What a stupid position to take.

And what a vitriolic attitude.

How hypocritical of you to accuse someone else of vitriol when your argument is that if you have concerns about false rape claims that you hate women. An idiotic position like that is entirely deserving of scorn.

Abnormal psych isn't a field of glorified snake oil.

Maybe it's my own bias, but I have little time for any of these soft sciences which usually utterly fail the scientific method.

[Galloism]

I thought this was an interesting study - it's out of Australia. Australia has a real big push over the last couple years to end violence against women, and try to get it made unacceptable in a social context. This is a great idea. I think it should be expanded to everyone.

Particularly as violence against men is more socially acceptable than violence against women in Australia.

I guess you all would like a source. I'm looking at the table on page 77.

There's several categories here, and I'm going to mostly focus on the "just shouldn't hit her/him" column because that's where most of these need to be placed. The notable exceptions are "throws something at him/her", where hitting in self defense may be justified, and "hits him/her" where, again, hitting in self defense may be justified. Other than those two cases, higher is better.

In every scenario, it's more acceptable to hit a man than it is to hit a woman, and these percentages are uncomfortably high regardless.

When a man refuses to have sex with a woman, 29% of people either think she has the right to hit him, or understands why she did. 23% say the same when a woman refuses to have sex with a man.

When it comes to obedience, 25% say it's either right or understandable for a man to hit a woman who argues with him or refuses to obey him. 33% say the same about men who argue or refuse to obey. That's about a third higher against men.

When it comes to nagging, 28% think it either right or understandable to hit a nagging woman, while 37% say the same when it comes to a nagging man. Again, that's right about a third higher against men.

When it comes to a specific form of verbal abuse, calling their partner useless or good for nothing, 53% expressed either approval or understanding of hitting a woman saying these things to a man. 67% expressed the same for hitting a man saying these things to a woman. That's about a quarter higher against men.

When a woman accuses a man of having sex with another woman when he was innocent, 49% expressed approval or understanding of hitting her. When it was the other way, 60% approved of hitting him. That's 22% higher against men.

When a woman wastes a lot of money on gambling or drugs, 63% (nearly two in three!) approved of hitting her or understood it. 72% (nearly 3 in 4!) approved of hitting a man or understood it in this scenario.

When a woman admits to having sex with another man, 70% approve or understand hitting her. 80% approve or understand hitting a man in this scenario.


So those were all the scenarios where you SHOULDN'T be hitting people. Now there's two more that could arguably be legitimate self defense scenarios (depending on the circumstance):


When a woman throws something at a man, 9% say he has a right to hit her. 20% say he doesn't have a right but has a good reason. 32% say he shouldn't but they understand it. 32% say he shouldn't hit her at all.

When a man throws something at a woman, 22% say she has a right to hit him. 21% say she has a good reason. 29% say she shouldn't, but they understand. 22% say she just shouldn't hit him at all.


When a woman hits a man, 16% say he has a right to hit her back. 22% say he has a good reason. 29% say he shouldn't, but they understand. 27% say he just shouldn't hit her.

When a man hits a woman, 39% say she has a right to hit him back. 21% say she has a good reason. 18% say she shouldn't, but they understand. 15% say she shouldn't hit him.


We can see, across all scenarios, violence against men is more acceptable than violence against women. Also, these numbers are uncomfortably high against everyone. When it comes to (arguably) self defense scenarios, women acting in self defense is more acceptable than men acting in self defense. But that's not quite the whole story.

See, they kept talking:

Acceptability of female to male violence
Female to male violence was not only viewed light-heartedly, it was also seen as (virtually)
acceptable. On reflection, both genders agreed that this constituted a double standard, and
that it was not acceptable — really. But there was no censure, and a good deal of hilarity
generated by discussion of the topic in the female groups. In the male groups, acceptability
was implied through their beliefs that there was no need to retaliate to female violence in any
way. This acceptability appears to be associated with:

❙ the fact that female to male violence is not seen to cause any harm (although some felt that
continuous hitting/kicking etc might eventually affect self esteem)

That's bullshit, but moving on, this bit was interesting:

‘Guys deserve it’. Both sexes supported this point of view, which was based on the idea that
‘guys stuff up’, ‘guys can be majorly stupid’, ‘guys don’t listen so you have to get their
attention’. Males appeared to agree with the perceived wisdom of society (and certainly of
females) that they are ‘not as good at relationships’ as the females. Indeed, the fact they
are ‘not listening’ reinforces some typical male attributes/stereotypes, and in this context
males were quite comfortable with the charge

This is what our society has wrought. Boys and girls both view boys as "stupid" and "not listening" on the basis of their gender, and deserving of the beatings. We have literally turned our youth into thinking it's acceptable to beat someone on the basis of their gender because that gender is inferior and stupid.

Down on page 79 there was an interesting cluster of attitudes. See, they could put these groups in boxes, roughly:

Cluster 1: Supportive of female Attitudes to male to female violence average; to male violence stronger support for female to male violence. N=2069 41% of sample

Cluster 2: Negative to violence by both sexes; Attitudes to male to female violence, female to male violence negative (ie low support for any violence). N=1682 34% of sample

Cluster 3: More supportive of violence by both sexes. Attitudes to male to violence violence and female to male violence positive (Ie, relatively high support for violence.) N=1117 22% of sample

There is no fourth cluster. We see 3 groups - cluster 2 are egalitarian decent people. Cluster 3 are egalitarian assholes. Cluster 1, the largest group, are sexist assholes.


Based on everything we've analyzed in the feminist thread so far, it is extremely likely that female to male domestic violence is more culturally acceptable and needs to be combatted more harshly. What say ye?

[Forsher]

But anything to decry them mean ol' liberals, even if it's blatantly contradictory to what they're actually saying or standing for.

An investigation was had. Unless some witnesses have been living under rocks for the past month, we're not likely to do much better than we did. Besides that the "believe all women" narrative is really problematic in how it portrays sexual assault and the process of justice.

As a veteran of the Kenneth Starr affair, I am sure Kavanaugh will be one of the first people to tell you that investigations with time limits on them aren't really investigations.

(Actually I think he probably wouldn't but you get the idea.)

Yes, where the FBI didn't have the authority to interview Kavanaugh, Ford, or 7 of the 16 witnesses. Truly a fair and proper exercise of justice!

Honestly, this whole thing should have ended when Kavanaugh perjured himself in front of Congress. Full stop, right there, perjuring yourself to Congress means you shouldn't be a supreme court judge. Also, you should be charged with perjury.

But we couldn't stop there. Oh no. We had to go on. Then Ford went and perjured herself in front of Congress. Whereupon Kavanaugh went and perjured himself again in front of Congress.

Why there aren't charges flying around is pure politics.

Someone should bring a case to the Supreme Court about whether its nomination approval process is constitutional. If they didn't accept the case they'd have no credibility as an institution and if they did accept it they'd either have to rule Kavanaugh's "uh uh you can't ask me that" tactic unconstitutional* or turn the whole thing into a straight up rubber stamp.

*This is edge-spk for that weird way some things appear to be out of bounds or whatever it is.

Yes, where the FBI didn't have the authority to interview Kavanaugh, Ford, or 7 of the 16 witnesses. Truly a fair and proper exercise of justice!

What would the FBI have gained in interviewing those people? Do you believe that eye witness testimonies, often on subjects unrelated to the original accusation, would have adequately corroborated accusations of wrong-doing?

A priori assertions of the meaning of interviews are obviously incapable of being evidence. Try again.

But how do we know? Then I saw that the number came from the fact that that was the percentage of claims that were either withdrawn or proven to be untrue, which is obviously not the entire number. Many rape claims don't even make it to the authorities, and so, false or not, are not counted. It is also likely that some cases which were not withdrawn or proven to be untrue were false claims but were not proven to be so.

You can only have false claims out of the number of claims... which in context means stories that either come to courts, university kangaroo courts or the media. The percentage proven to be false or dropped requires assuming the justice system can work... and if it can't then there are a lot bigger issues going on.

Unless there is a systematic error in favour of dismissing true rapes it should all balance. And since there probably is that systematic error (since it's a hard thing to investigate)

(demonstrably false claims + withdrawn claims + overturned verdicts) / (claims made to police + claims in the university system + media circuses)

should be a conservative estimate.

The numbers are actually a bit higher than that and, anyhow, it's fallacious to apply general statistics to a specific case in the manner that some have attempted. Ninety percent of people might be heterosexual but that does not mean that in talking to a particular person you have not stumbled onto someone who is gay or bisexual. It's the same with an accused person. So, essentially, even if we grant the basic presumptions behind the argument, it's still a bad argument.

I mean, in any crime, if I was sitting on a jury, and I felt there was a 2% chance the person didn't do the crime, you know what I would call that?

If you believe in statistical significance you shouldn't call it reasonable doubt. If that was a p-value (i.e. the rate at which we convict people given they actually didn't do it) we'd accept it as significant.

[Fahran]

As a veteran of the Kenneth Starr affair, I am sure Kavanaugh will be one of the first people to tell you that investigations with time limits on them aren't really investigations.

(Actually I think he probably wouldn't but you get the idea.)

Investigations lacking in pertinent details are difficult enough to facilitate with any degree of adequacy. The FBI was at liberty to interview whoever they wanted so long as such interviews were limited to the context of the two more credible accusations of sexual assault leveled against Kavanaugh, namely those based on the testimonies, affidavits, and letters of Ford and Ramirez. The FBI contacted ten people and interviewed nine of them, without restriction. They ignored "witnesses" who would not have been useful or connected to the events in question and concluded the probe well before the timeline. Four of the witnesses cited as not being interviewed weren't available and the rest weren't relevant. Ford's husband and her polygraph were not useful.

Source.

A priori assertions of the meaning of interviews are obviously incapable of being evidence. Try again.

The FBI are our experts on this. They chose not to interview certain people because they felt their testimonies were largely irrelevant to the charges of sexual misconduct and sexual assault against Kavanaugh. I'm not certain why we keep changing our mind about the credibility of the FBI, but that's here and there.

[Tahar Joblis]

And what a vitriolic attitude.

How hypocritical of you to accuse someone else of vitriol when your argument is that if you have concerns about false rape claims that you hate women. An idiotic position like that is entirely deserving of scorn.

Abnormal psych isn't a field of glorified snake oil.

Maybe it's my own bias, but I have little time for any of these soft sciences which usually utterly fail the scientific method.

Psychology varies wildly by subfield.

Social psychology has been notoriously hard-hit by the replication crisis. There's a lot of junk in social psych. The notorious "himmicane" paper discussed here is really a social psychology paper - "how do people react to hurricanes based on the gender of the hurricane's name?"

One cause of bad science is that the scientists have an agenda other than discovery of the truth. (E.g., ideological motivations or financial interests.) Another cause is noisy difficult-to-interpret cheap data. It's really easy to run a social psych experiment on the cheap with somewhere around n=100 students, and a lot of people have agendas when it comes to social psych (feminists being one example, although not the only example).

Abnormal psych, OTOH, is closer to the medical end, with expensive data (since subject recruitment is a lot harder) and fewer agendas that are adjacent.

[Des-Bal]

Do wonen need to chill out?

Just had a discussion with someone, about the curfew for men thing that got passed around a while back. How much merit is there in the idea that women's safety concerns are better addressed by changing women's perceptions than by changing society?

The suggested curfew lead to a great number of women stating how unsafe they felt in public space at night
This is despite the fact that women are statistically much less likely to be victims of crime in public and more likely to be assisted by a third party. If women are more safe but feel less safe isn't the issue changing their feelings rather than elevating them to an even greater position of privilege?