Kathy_Forth

Karma: 96

Kathy_Forth Nov 13, 2017, 12:57 AM
1 point
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in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
I scoured Google Scholar for sexual violence reduction methods. I already included what I found in the article. It appears to me that workplaces don’t have anything better. I’m pretty sure managers just decide who to believe when someone is being accused, and just make a decision about which side to take. Some might investigate, but investigations would usually produce no evidence because this is sexual violence and it doesn’t leave much. Most issues just lead to a game of he-said-she-said that can’t be resolved.

I don’t see any reason to believe anyone has any better methods than what I found. This is not just because I didn’t find anything better while scouring Google Scholar, it’s because of what I’m seeing out there in the world. When I have reported sexual violence, there was no tried and true method to rely on. When I look at my Facebook feed, I see articles about celebrity survivors publicly accusing people, suggesting that they don’t have an evidence based method.

If you have an angle, great, please let me know if you find a well-researched method.

Kathy_Forth Nov 13, 2017, 12:29 AM
5 points
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in reply to: Lila’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Good point about false precision. I hadn’t thought of that. The article has been updated!

You wrote: “A more tractable approach to reducing the trauma from sexual violence might be to change perceptions of sexuality. Many people believe that it’s important for women to be sexually “pure”, which is one reason that female victims experience trauma.”

You didn’t cite anything for this. I am concerned that some people may become confused and think they can convince women to tolerate atrocity. There are people out there who will twist anything into a justification to rape. Your paragraph there is the sort of information they might twist into rationalizations and cognitive distortions.

I’ve read a lot of research on psychological trauma. I’m convinced that most people have an instinctive reaction to sexual violence which involves psychological trauma being triggered automatically. From where I’m sitting, it looks like you just haven’t done very much reading on this topic.

For one thing, if sexual trauma is social programming, why do men respond in the same manner? Shouldn’t they have a different reaction? If a woman rapes a man, he will be psychologically traumatized. I’ve heard of men who were baffled by their own sexual trauma. Men are harmed, too, and in a similar way to what women experience.

Children don’t even have social programming about sex yet. A lot of children have never even heard of sex. Yet, if a child is raped, that’s psychologically devastating. The effects can last their whole lives. Explain that.

Kathy_Forth Nov 13, 2017, 12:12 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
I’m glad to hear you would find that easy, Zeke. I made dozens of estimations in this article, and decided that instead of upgrading every single one of them to the maximum level of quality, I should focus on higher value things like raising awareness and persuading people to test methods of sexual violence reduction and doing in-depth evaluations of the two scalable sexual violence reduction methods. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to upgrade all these estimations to the maximum level myself.

How long do you think it would take you to upgrade every single estimate to the maximum quality level? (I’ll just let you count the number of estimations in the article since they’re right there.) Would you be up for meeting my quality standards if I laid them out as a set of criteria?

Please provide your estimate as the number of hours you will require to upgrade every single estimate in the article to the absolute maximum level of quality.

Also, would you be able to do this for free? I’m in the middle of a career change.

(I normally wouldn’t ask but you said you would find it easy and asking can’t hurt!)

Thanks.

Kathy_Forth Nov 13, 2017, 12:04 AM
−1 points
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
I am already aware of a pretty large number of correlations between sexual violence and a lot of different things. I’m telling you that there are a bunch of other things on that list I provided which would significantly alter the result of the estimate.

I’m definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate just race. I am definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate the entire list.

I think the most worthwhile way of getting a better estimate is to do a study, so I will not put further time into this discussion.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 11:56 PM
2 points
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in reply to: weeatquince’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Thanks weeatquince. Given problems like the replication crisis and publication bias, I am focusing on meta-analyses and review articles as my main source of information wherever possible. If I didn’t see any, I sought out multiple studies on the same topic and included them all.

So far, the results of these studies has been really poor when it comes to sexual violence reduction programs. Therefore, I’m feeling sceptical.

Until the research on a particular method has at least replicated, I cannot include it in the article. I’m sorry.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 11:47 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Does this contain detailed enough information on the different kinds of perps that you can actually use it to target the worst type? That’s the part I’m concerned will be missing.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 11:45 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Alex_Barry’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
The reason is because the topic is simply too complicated, there is too much ignorance, and there are too many myths. If I published anything shorter it would seem to be full of holes to the reader.

I hope to have the time to write a series of shorter articles in the future. Even if I don’t do this, I bet other people will. People have already begun expressing interest in this.

The ball is rolling. The short articles will come.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 2:38 AM
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in reply to: Alex_Barry’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
This post is long because there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about sexual violence. To have accurate ideas about the effective altruism potential of sexual violence reduction as a cause, one needs to be informed about a bunch of things at once. Given the complexity of the issue and the number of common misconceptions, a long length was the only way to do this topic justice.

This is a foundation article. Now that it exists, a series of short articles can be written based on the information and context contained in it to help raise awareness.

(As explained to Denise.)

So, yes, it’s a long and complicated post, and there are certain downsides to that, which you have described pretty clearly. I’m sorry about the post formatting. It didn’t paste over very well from Google Docs. I’m currently working on editing the HTML version to fix all the formatting issues, so at least that should be improved soon. :)

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 2:32 AM
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
The way in which gender is relevant while race is not is that sexual attractions are limited by gender preferences in most humans.

Given that most sexually violent people attack one gender but not the other, and given that our gender ratio is very seriously skewed, gender is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.

Given that you believe a race adjustment should go with gender adjustment, I don’t see why you are not also advocating for all of the following:
- age
- marital status
- literacy
- education
- employment status
- occupation
- geographical location
- place of birth
- previous residence
- language
- religion
- nationality
- ethnicity
- citizenship

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 2:16 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Actually, to avoid bias when adjusting a prior, we really need to include as many adjustments as possible all at once.

Otherwise, unscrupulous people can just come along and say “Let’s adjust these three things!”, which all make the risk look smaller, thereby misleading people into thinking that the risk is negligible.

Or an ordinary biased human being could come along and accidentally ask for ten things to be adjusted which all just so happen to make the risk look super exaggerated.

We’ll have a lot of vulnerability to various biases if we adjust stuff without careful consideration.

Also, if we think it is always better to chuck in arbitrary adjustments, then this creates an incentive for people to come along with a pet political belief and try to have everyone include it everywhere all the time, just for the sake of promoting their pet belief constantly.

One arbitrarily selected adjustment is not better.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 1:07 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
I am using estimates to make other estimates. I clearly labelled each estimate as an estimate.

It would be nice to have high-quality data, such as from doing our own studies. First, someone needs to do an estimate to show why the research questions are interesting enough to invest in studies.

I am doing the sorts of estimates that show why certain research questions are interesting. These estimates might inspire someone to fund a study.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 12:54 AM
−1 points
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
It’s not clear that spending hundreds of hours updating this estimate to include dozens of factors is worthwhile. We could instead do our own undetected rapist study on the EA population with that kind of time. Do you have a few hundred hours for this, and the research background needed? Do you want to fund a researcher to do it?

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 12:30 AM
3 points
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in reply to: Sammy’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
“There are a lot of options that have a chance to succeed. The impact could be many times greater than the effort it takes to use the options explored herein. Testing is needed to determine the effectiveness of the options. Given the human rights concerns and the potential for a large productivity impact, testing options could turn out to be very worthwhile.”—from my conclusion section.

This is my honest conclusion, which I made as accurate as possible. We do not know how effective all the methods are, but it looks like it’s worth testing them to find out.

Having this information is a valid kind of progress.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 12:26 AM
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
“Note 3: We cannot assume that EA rapists target only other EAs. Sometimes, they might target people outside the social network. We cannot assume that EAs are targeted only by EA rapists. Sometimes they might be targeted by people outside the social network. Depending on how much of an EA’s social life consists of contact with other EAs and also depending on how sociable they are, their individual risk will vary. There is not enough lifestyle information available on EAs for me to include numbers on this into the estimate.”

I am beginning to wonder if you read carefully because it looks like you missed multiple things that were already addressed.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 12:22 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
While some people are so uninvolved that they would not take the EA survey, others are so very busy that they might not take the EA survey either, even though they should be counted.

Unless research is done to determine what percentage of EA takes the EA survey, we cannot assume that it is accurate.

For that reason, I am using the total number of EAs from the survey as the low estimate. For the high estimate, I am using the EA Facebook group.

The exact number of EAs is unknown but probably lies between these two figures. So, as an estimate, there are probably between 2,352-13,861 people in the effective altruism movement, like I mentioned.

Kathy_Forth Nov 12, 2017, 12:18 AM
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in reply to: Zeke_Sherman’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
The study on the left will say race A commits more crimes while the study on the right will say it’s race B. Do people of a particular race commit more crimes, or are they just more likely to be convicted due to prejudice? As I said, incorporating all these other factors would be very complicated.

“It could easily require an article of the same length as this one, just to create an estimate which takes all known relevant factors into account. To ensure enough time for the other parts of this article, a simple rough estimate has been created based on information about the overall population. Please remember that this is an estimate.”

I feel like you didn’t read the quoted part there.

Kathy_Forth Nov 11, 2017, 11:46 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Sammy’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
There are a lot of ways in which sexual violence has an impact on effective altruism, so reducing sexual violence will help us reach our effective altruism goals in various different ways. Because it will help us do more effective altruism, and the cost-benefit ratio looks good, I believe that gives it a lot of potential to be an effective altruism cause. It seems like you may not have read the entire impact section. Here is a table of contents for the impact section:

Impact

Estimating the number of sexually violent people.
- Why we should not assume that effective altruism repels sex offenders:
- About 6% of men are rapists and an unknown percentage of women.
- A rough estimate of rapists in EA:
Sexual violence reduction as a life saver:
- Sexual violence reduction as suffering reduction:
Sexual violence reduction for diversity and disadvantage reduction:
- Comparing sexual violence rates by gender:
- Greatly multiplied risk to women due to the gender ratio in EA:
- Gay and bisexual people have around twice the sexual violence risk:
- List of specific disadvantages that EA women, bisexuals and homosexuals face:
Potential of sexual violence reduction to prevent productivity loss:
- The low estimate:
- The high estimate:
Sexual violence reduction as part of movement building:
- The male sex offenders studied are shockingly prolific:
- Sex offenders increase turnover in workplaces:
Sexual violence reduction for lawsuit prevention:

Kathy_Forth Nov 11, 2017, 11:25 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Edit: There is a table of contents now.

By the time the suggestion to create a table of contents came along, it was too late to do so. I agree. If I get some time today or tomorrow I will do that.

I couldn’t split this into multiple posts. There are multiple context reasons for doing it this way. I’m sorry that this is inconvenient. I accept that fewer people will read the entire article. That won’t stop me from making progress. Like I said, this article is a foundation. This is step 1. :)

I will probably write multiple shorter articles later.

The great thing about having all the context in one place is that when I write multiple shorter articles, I can refer to the big article a bunch of times! :D

That will help me keep the short articles short!

Kathy_Forth Nov 11, 2017, 11:23 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Good point, Denise! Would you please direct me to the part of the article I should edit?

Kathy_Forth Nov 11, 2017, 11:20 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential
Great suggestion! “Are most acts of sexual violence committed by a select particularly egregious few or by the presumably more common ‘casual rapist’? Answering this question is relevant for picking the strategies to focus on. This is because it seems plausible that different types of people who commit rape require different strategies to stop them.”

I suspect political pressure has effectively prevented in-depth research on this specific topic from being done. There is a lot of political pressure to stigmatise rape as much as possible, no matter what kind it is, or how often it occurs, or any other factors. Without this pressure, there is a realistic concern that a significant minority of people would twist the information into a new rape myth.

For instance, a sufficiently twisted person might decide that the “real” rapists are the ones targeting 10 people or more, and then incorrectly conclude that “just” one rape doesn’t make you a rapist, therefore rationalizing committing an atrocity. :(

I think it’s great to use information-based leverage from research to prevent mayhem. Since you asked, I will check this if I can manage to fit it in somewhere. I’m just letting you know that the reason I didn’t already invest the time into looking into this is because I suspect political pressures would prevent that sort of study from being done in the first place.