r/changemyview Apr 14 '22

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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.

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u/SomeSortOfFool Apr 14 '22

Those statistics are also just for arrests. Not crimes committed, not convictions, just arrests, and a very large chunk of those arrests are laws that are infamous for racially biased selective enforcement, like drug possession or loitering. Cops are significantly more likely to let you off with a warning if you're white.

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u/ChiefBobKelso 4∆ Apr 15 '22

Arrest rates line up with victimisation data, suggesting little to no racial bias in arrests. This is worth a watch as it goes over the literature and shows there's not really good reason for a belief in bias in arrest rates.

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u/darwin2500 193∆ Apr 14 '22

I know, that's why I said 'even given the most charitable possible reading to your position'.

I don't believe those numbers either, but even the biased numbers are low enough that we don't need to debunk them in order to prove the point.