oh yeah, scott would never use bad math to force a monstrous point

Take sexual harassment. Surveys suggest that about 5% of people admit to having sexually harassed someone at some point in their lives; given that it’s the kind of thing people have every reason to lie about, the real number is probably higher. Let’s say 10%.

So if there’s a community of 10,000 people, probably 1,000 of them have sexually harassed someone. So when you hear on the news that someone in that community sexually harassed someone, it shouldn’t change your opinion of that community at all. You started off pretty sure there were about 1,000, and now you know that there is at least one. How is that an update?!

Still, every few weeks there’s a story about someone committing sexual harassment in (let’s say) the model airplane building community, and then everyone spends a few days talking about how airplanes are sexist and they always knew the model builders were up to no good.

I mean this is just how people work! they hear about one case of sexual harassment, incorrectly update the probabilities in their heads, and then The Left convinces them that airplanes are sexist. these people are too stupid to have thoughts like “sexual harassment is happening way too often given the small size of the model airplane building community, and listening to the victims allowed me to figure out some of the systemic factors for why that’s the case for that community” and that’s why they fall into real, definitely not made up by scott to make the people he doesn’t like seem ridiculous, beliefs like airplanes being sexist. how dare these stupid people exist outside of Scott’s extremely mid imagination.

come the fuck on. this isn’t our first scott alexander post.

you’re seriously missing the point of what he’s trying to say. He’s just talking about [extremely mundane and self evident motte argument]

Nah, we're just not giving him the benefit of a doubt and also have a lot of context to work with.

Consider the fact that he explicitly writes that you are allowed to reconsider your assumptions on domestic terrorism if a second trans mass shooter incident "happens in a row" but a few paragraphs later Effective Altruists blowing up both FTX and OpenAI in the space of a year the second incident is immediately laundered away as the unfortunate result of them overcorrecting in good faith against unchecked CEO power.

This should stick out even to one approaching this with a blank slate perspective in my opinion.

Hey guys look it's the Scott whisperer, Mr. Beandog. Let's see what he's got for us today:

I’m not a fanboy

sure

or necessarrily agree with his argument

surely then, you wouldn't feel the need to 'splain it

but you’re seriously missing the point of what he’s trying to say.

oh ok

He’s just talking about how big, mediapathic events can unduly influence people’s perception of probability and risk

No, that isn't what he is saying, actually.

He doesn’t need actual real world numbers to show how this works, he’s just demonstrating how the math works and how the numbers change

He does, actually. You can't make fake mathematical statements about the real world and expect me to just buy your argument. He is demonstrating how the math hypothetically works in a scenario where he cooks the numbers. There is no reason why one should extrapolate that to the real world.

He isn’t trying to convince stupid people of anything, they aren’t his target audience and they will never think this way.

Oh ok. prior updated. Coulda sworn his target audience was morons.

He isn’t trying to convince stupid people of anything, they aren’t his target audience and they will never think this way.

you think "stupid people" is a meaningful social category, opinion dismissed.