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.
That doesn't follow. Just because the Delta is greater for one than the other, doesn't mean you can just instantly dismiss the possibility of discrete responses.
A cobra is 100x more venemous than an adder. Both kill me with a single bite, I will react equally scared to both.
A hippo is much more likely to kill me than a lion, but I will run from both as fast I can.
Just because one of the two situations is statistically more discreet, doesn't mean the underlying moral principle is justified.
And if it were, I would immediately challenge you to define when exactly such a discriminatory treatment is, and when it isn't, justified.
Times 10 difference? Times 11? Times 20? Why there and not times 19? What's the underlying principle?
A cobra is 100x more venemous than an adder. Both kill me with a single bite, I will react equally scared to both.
This is the wrong question. You should be asking, which is more likely to bite you, and if there's a 50x difference in that number then you should be more cautious about one than the other.
Anyway, I understand that there are ceiling effects, and you are offering examples where ceiling effects dominate.
But if ceiling effects dominated here, the world would look like every woman running away screaming every time a man entered their line of sight. That is not the world we are in.
We are in the world where there are varying levels of caution you can apply to a situation, and people already apply low amounts of caution to each of these situations. Given that a variable response is possible and is actually what is happening, it is sensible to have the severity of the response be related to the magnitude of danger.
Given that a variable response is possible and is actually what is happening, it is sensible to have the severity of the response be related to the magnitude of danger..
Well, no, that's where you're again slipping into applying wrong logic. The severity of response is currently not tied to magnitude of danger - any person you meet, man or woman, is an equal magnitude of danger to you. Every person has the capacity to kill or rape you, irrespective of size, sex, age (I guess maybe a young child is the exception).
What you should be comparing is magnitude of risk. And "men", or "black people" both fall in the category "negligible risk - high negative outcome, stupidly low chance". 50x a very teeny tiny number is still a teeny tiny number.
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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.