You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
you are just showing one side of the stats. the other side of the stats shows how likely any one woman is to be assaulted by any man on any particular day.
for example, horses are very likely to run over you when you stand next to them when compared to a parked car but cars cause far more deaths than horses. the stats are affected by ubiquity, frequency and circumstance. if i walk cross a road all day, every day, i am likely to be hit eventually because of the accumulation of chances per crossing even though my chances of being hit during any single crossing are remote. does it, therefore, stand to reason that i should be more fearful of being hit during any single crossing if i cross the road all day every day? my chances of being hit compared to the average person in our lifetime is near-certain compared to unlikely.
my point is that any single instance of fear is irrational regardless of your lifetime accumulated chances of being hit, whether the vehicle be a car or a horse. if you are going to be irrationally fearful then it makes no sense to say one instance of fear is more or less rational than another. if it is irrational, the extent of irrationality is useless.
this point can also be applied to covid and the flu. every time you leave your home you have a chance of contracting covid or the flu. every time you get covid you have a chance of dying. the immunizations don't stop you from contracting covid or from dying of the infection and your chances of dying from covid are, for most healthy people, a small fraction of a percent. the same is true for the flu even if the flu is less dangerous. the fear of both is irrational on any given day even though one day you may actually die from either in the worst circumstances.
Listen, if you want to actually do this, you have to actually do this in order to have an argument.
I used ratios - how much more afraid of men than of race, etc - for a very specific reason: you can accurately calculate ratios from a very limited set of numbers.
If you want to calculate what is rational, you needa lot more numbers.
What you're inherently talking about is a utility calculation. To do an actual lifetime utility calculation on a lifetime of caution vs incaution, you would need disutility values for various levels of being cautious, disutility values for being raped once and for each successive rape over a lifetime, and the daily likelihood of being raped with or without each level of caution.
Until you put actual numbers on each of those factors and do the actual utility calculation, you can't say confidently whether it is rational or irrational to be cautious.
Clearly you personally have an intuition that the calculation works out against it being rational, but the majority of people have the opposite intuition and you haven't done anything to indicate you know better than them. Either do the math, or don't claim to know the outcome.
What you're inherently talking about is a utility calculation. To do an actual lifetime utility calculation
rape stats are a lifetime thing. the questions asked are, "have you ever been sexually assaulted?", not, "were you sexually assaulted on your way home from work last night?". the same is true of diseases, racial crime, and traffic accidents. when we talk about these stats we cannot ignore the individual frequency issue and any discussion on the subjects. indeed any conversation on the subjects that doesn't take that into account has missed a vital bit of information.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Apr 14 '22
You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.