
The Supreme Court's Crucial Mistake About Sex Crime Statistics - minapurna
https://casetext.com/posts/the-supreme-courts-crucial-mistake-about-sex-crime-statistics
======
protomyth
This isn't as rare as I would like it. A few gun studies from the west coast
in the 90's pulled this kind of quote without justification or attribution.

Two additional things to be aware of are conditions of the study and people
pulling a statistic without the full qualification.

"This activity reduced X by 50%" is a popular one. It gets used when writing
grants, but often the original study had very specific environmental
conditions to go along with that reduction. Those are often ignored in the
activities spread.

Quite a lot of people pull quotes from even legitimate studies, but forget to
also pull the qualifiers. This happens a lot with medical studies.

There is another, but I can hardly blame people giving its an outright
deception. Sometime government agencies or individuals falsify data. We all
remember the whole vaccine thing and the damage it did. I can now blame folks
for repeating this long after the facts are know.

A popular one I've seen on HN is people quoting AMTRAK's budget showing
AMTRAK's ACELA Express is profitable. Sadly, that's only true if you use some
really shady accounting[1] and completely forget capital costs. You wouldn't
know that from the various articles quoting the actual budget report.

Politics sometimes trumps the doing of basic fact checking.

1) here is one of the internal critiques of even the newer accounting
[https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/Amtrak's%20New%2...](https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/Amtrak's%20New%20Cost%20Accounting%20System%20Report%5E3-27-13.pdf)
and [http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/782/517/Amtrak-Report-on-
Interna...](http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/782/517/Amtrak-Report-on-Internal-
Control-Over-Financial-Reporting-2013.pdf)

~~~
bmelton
I've (sadly) conditioned myself to reading post hoc ergo propter hoc
statements as effectively useless in today's time.

There are some statements that I suspect make intuitive conclusions, and many
of which I suspect are right (e.g., availability of birth control lowers the
rate of abortions and unplanned pregnancies), but even those with which I
agree are relegated to the portion of my mind that holds the "do not recite
this" category of statistics.

I understand why people are so susceptible to it, and indeed, what makes the
scientific method so damn hard to being with, is because isolation and
controls in the real world are indeed very hard to come by, but I do wish that
it was something we could do less.

------
lifeisstillgood
Unless I am missing some hidden biases this seems an interesting discussion
with some worthwhile thinking material. It does not seem like a "rape
apologist", whatever that is.

For me the main argument is a big one::

When the California Corrections Department recently examined cases of sex
offender registrants returned to prison for a new offense, they found that in
88% of the cases, the new offense was a parole violation. Parole violations
are generally acts that aren’t crimes for anyone not on parole—things like
going to a bar or visiting a friend who’s also an ex-felon. Only 1.8% of those
re-incarcerated had committed a new sex offense.

That's a really big mis step in defining recidivist rates - and I would think
it is worth following up in all cases (not just sex offences)

~~~
fweespeech
Eh, I'd say the bigger bit is compared to all ex-felons:

> About 3% of felons with no known history of sex offenses commit one within
> 4.5 years of their release.

Its pretty clear:

To justify having a subset of ex-felons [sex offenders] on the list, all ex-
felons have to be on the list. Otherwise, the justification [they are sex
offenders] falls flat when other types of ex-felons commit sex offenses more
frequently.

Honestly, it sounds like a publicly auditable and widely accessible list of
felons is likely what we need if we consider 1.8% reason to put people on a
list.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Ok I get your point, and you seem to be arguing the same as the article - the
value of a register of sex offenders is not as great as it might seem.

it depends I suppose on whether the register has much of an effect. I mean if
you reoffend even after going to jail, having your name on a list seems
unlikely to help.

~~~
fweespeech
It isn't identical to the article.

I think there needs to be a list of convicted felons somewhere that is widely
accessible with their addresses so people are aware they are in the
neighborhood. However, I don't think it should list them as "sex offenders" or
the like. There is an unearned stigma in many of the cases. [e.g. urinating in
public gets you on THE LIST]

------
patzerhacker
Better be careful posting this. You don't want to be labeled by Matthew
Garrett as a rape apologist[0].

[0]
[http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18505.html?thread=693321](http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18505.html?thread=693321)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
It truly is astonishing sometimes just what a remarkably thought-terminating
taboo the topic of rape and sexual assault is. Of course it's a gravely
serious one, but I don't exaggerate when I say most people are more
comfortable talking about genocide than they are about rape.

Is it because a mass atrocity is more impersonal, or is there a degree of
puritanism to the whole angle?

That said, mjg59 has always been a vested partisan on these topics, so I
wouldn't use him to make any broader points.

~~~
afarrell
Because nobody will suspect you of having both the intention and power to
carry out genocide.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
So because it's more impersonal, then.

~~~
Nimi
Consider another explanation: If you use the term "rape culture", you
essentially claim that in today's society, oftentimes rape will be accepted
(FWIW, I agree with this statement). However, there appears to be a consensus
in today's society that genocide is always a bad thing; generally that opinion
is expressed without any qualifiers (as opposed to qualifiers like "legitimate
rape" etc.)

------
peterwwillis
Statistics, both invented and real, are used all the time by people who want a
tool to silence those who disagree with them. But two facts make this a
dangerous and inaccurate form of argument: one, statistics can only be used to
disprove something, and two, different studies often show wildly different
results. If you actually dig into the number that people quote, you'll quickly
find other studies that report different numbers, use different criteria and
show different conclusions. But you'll only hear someone quote a single study,
because it's the one that benefits their argument the most.

------
wheaties
I think this article conveys a real theme when it comes to using, misusing or
listening to someone else totally making sh#t up that only serves their
purpose data. Here are hard decisions based on dubious data with real
implications to people's lives. I just don't see how this connects to HN, tech
or start-ups.

~~~
adventured
HN isn't limited to either tech or start-ups.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

If this article had been about a typical crime, in a typical city, with little
else of interest, then perhaps it would be overwhelmingly unsuitable for HN.

I can't speak for anyone else, but the article gratifies my intellectual
curiosity. It's fascinating to find out about such an important abuse of
information, spanning decades, at the highest levels of the judicial system.

------
dataker
I hope this link doesn't get flagged.

In HN, I've been seeing a lot of links with useful information be
unnecessarily flagged by ideologists.

~~~
overpaidgoogler
I don't closely follow which articles are flagged, but I think that articles
with a tech angle or some novel statistical or scientific analysis are favored
over general politics. The reason I flag general political articles (eg
articles about race or gender issues without any of the above) is that I don't
find the discussions interesting, and I think that the posters are coming from
a viewpoint of "this stuff is important so it should be discussed everywhere,
whether people want to or not"

