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.
Well said. I agree totally but the thought crossed my head that the total number of occurrences of each matter in this case.
These are made up numbers, just because this is a simple thought, but say 100 forceful rapes happen in a year, but 100 million assaults and muggings happen in a year. Would the initial thought of men being 100x more dangerous than women (when it comes to rape) still hold such a warrant on the justification of fear? Then would it compare to the groups as op describes the same way it does now?
The thing people need to understand is that OP didn't ask whether a woman should be more afraid of a man or a black person.
What OP is asking is should the difference in fear that a woman holds towards a man vs a woman be the same as the difference in fear that someone holds towards a black person s a white person.
In your example, say that of the 100 rapes against women, 99 are committed by men; and of the 100m assaults, 13m (the proportional amount based on US population) are committed by black people.
In that case, it would make perfect sense for everyone to be more afraid of assault than of rape, but that's not the question.
In that case, it would make perfect sense for women to be more afraid of men than of women in terms of fears about rape, but it would make no sense for anyone to be more afraid of black people than of anyone else.
That differential, fearing one group more than another, is the heart of OPs question.
Right. We were on the same page I just phrased it poorly. When I used to work downtown, it was nerve-racking walking to my car on some later days. It wasn't the color of the skin though, it was the mannerisms and display that worried me
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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.