It sounds like you want to engage constructively to reduce abuse in the community, and I appreciate that. The community will be stronger in the long run if it can be a safer and more welcoming space.
I know we’re a bunch of weirdos with a very specific set of subcultural tics, but I hope everyone appreciates your efforts to help. I think people here really are unusually motivated to do good and there is a lot of goodwill as a result. On the other hand, I think a lot of that is ego driven. And it’s a very nerdy culture, male-dominated and probably many people here have a predictable set of blind spots as a result.
Wish I had more to say, or could do more to help, but I’m not in the bay area, don’t work in tech, and don’t have very much context for the cultural problems you’re encountering.
Scott Alexander said “0.3% chance of false accusation”, I calculated 1⁄4000 ( This number is based on the FBI UCR study: 93,000 reported rapes yearly X (.97 X .03 X .2 chance of falsely naming a man) X 75 years / 160000000 men = 0.025% or 1 in 4000 chance of being falsely accused of rape. FBI: UCR. “2015 Crime in the United States.” FBI. Accessed July 23, 2022. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/rape)) Either way, still rare.
… Men have a 1 in 4,000 or 0.025% (or 0.3%, if we use Scott Alexander’s number) chance of being falsely accused.
This is a highly misleading summary. 0.3% is not Alexander’s estimate, it is his attempt to get an ultra-conservative impossible-to-be-lower-than-this lower bound. His best guess was literally 10x higher:
So greater than 0.3% of men get falsely accused of rape sometime in their lives, and the most likely number is probably around 3%.
This is over 100x higher than your number. And it’s not even his upper bound, which is significantly higher still.
EA has copped a lot of media criticism lately. Some of it (especially the stuff more directly associated with FTX) is well-deserved. There are some other loud critics who seem to be motivated by personal vendettas and/or seem to fundamentally object with the movement’s core aims and values, but rather than tackling those head-on, seem to be trying to simply through everything that’ll stick, no matter how flimsy.
None of that excuses dismissal of the concerning patterns of abuse you’ve raised, but I think it explains some of the defensiveness around here right now.
It sounds like you want to engage constructively to reduce abuse in the community, and I appreciate that. The community will be stronger in the long run if it can be a safer and more welcoming space.
I know we’re a bunch of weirdos with a very specific set of subcultural tics, but I hope everyone appreciates your efforts to help. I think people here really are unusually motivated to do good and there is a lot of goodwill as a result. On the other hand, I think a lot of that is ego driven. And it’s a very nerdy culture, male-dominated and probably many people here have a predictable set of blind spots as a result.
Wish I had more to say, or could do more to help, but I’m not in the bay area, don’t work in tech, and don’t have very much context for the cultural problems you’re encountering.
This is a highly misleading summary. 0.3% is not Alexander’s estimate, it is his attempt to get an ultra-conservative impossible-to-be-lower-than-this lower bound. His best guess was literally 10x higher:
This is over 100x higher than your number. And it’s not even his upper bound, which is significantly higher still.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E/
EA has copped a lot of media criticism lately. Some of it (especially the stuff more directly associated with FTX) is well-deserved. There are some other loud critics who seem to be motivated by personal vendettas and/or seem to fundamentally object with the movement’s core aims and values, but rather than tackling those head-on, seem to be trying to simply through everything that’ll stick, no matter how flimsy.
None of that excuses dismissal of the concerning patterns of abuse you’ve raised, but I think it explains some of the defensiveness around here right now.