Mature content. Nothing titillating but I discuss topics that some will find disturbing.
Also high in nerdy math.
Proceed at your own risk.
There is a high-end blogger who makes a classic "heuristic" mistake.
Even though this gentleman has advanced, technical degrees and graduated from one of the most academically regarded Ivy League Universities, he makes (statistically) moronic statements. Paraphrasing here:
"Because I don't personally know any women who have been sexually assaulted in a University environment, it doesn't happen."
This is a variation of well-meaning, naive people who are SURE that you can change anybody's behavior if you just tell them to change. After all, that is all they had to do to get Muffy to behave. This has been dubbed "The Middle-class Bubble" by some writers but the phenomena transcends socioeconomic class.
On the other hand, you can talk to virtually anybody who ever worked in a prison or was a cop-on-the-street for decades and they will laugh so hard at the above statements that they will have to change their shorts.
This HUGE difference in opinion is a puzzling phenomena and measuring the "evil that lurks in the hearts of men" does not easily bow to rigor and precision. Is there even a glimmer of hope of quantifying the distribution of that evil?
Analysis by proxies
When a researcher cannot find data that matches his area of inquiry, he casts about looking for something, anything, that is academically rigorous and resembles the data he is looking for.
If his interest is in "miscreants" then he runs into several problems. How does one define "miscreant" and then how can one quantify its measurement? The more practical problem is "How does he find enough funding to run a study large enough to be statistically meaningful?". It isn't as if "miscreants" were sources of wealth or have been specifically identified as a burning, social issue.
This is where we get to the "mature" content.
Might the variation in life-time "body-count" (the number of unique people one has been sexually intimate with) serve as a reasonable proxy for degree of "miscreant"? Large body-counts implies
- Disregard for cultural norms and mores
- Probable lack of impulse-control
- A lack of empathy for others and disregard for emotional pain inflicted
- A lack of concern for public health/welfare
- It suggests attachment or bonding issues
Those are all characteristics that miscreants demonstrate.
Let's address the elephant in the room. All data that relies on surveys is of very low quality. Many people will choose to not reply. Data related to income, sex, religion, exercise and diet is even more distorted due to emotional baggage and respondents anticipating what the questioner is looking for...and selective memory. The quality of the data for "body count" sucks.
Internal consistency-checks confirm the crappy quality. Questions are typically structured "How many unique encounters have you had in the last 30 days, 365 days and in your life-time?" One would expect a higher degree of consistency between the responses than is seen in-the-field.
Having acknowledged the highly dubious quality of the data, we have to move on. We are reduced to sifting through the data looking for insights, not absolute, quantitative precision.
There is a wealth of papers funded by the National Institute of Health on "body-count".
With no further ado:
Median Lifetime Body-count (US male) 5-to-7 for vaginal sex (and nearly the same for oral)
Average Lifetime Body-count (US male) 2.5-to-3 times the median
As somebody who has worked with statistics, when I see an "average" that is significantly more than the median, that immediately tells me that the curve has asymmetric tails and that there are some members of the population who have measurements that are several-times the median.
One spreadsheet formula/population that approximates those values is
=abs(norm.inv(rand(),1.6,1.0)*norm.inv(rand(),1.6,1.0)^3) times 10,000 cells
This tends to create too many life-time virgins but does a pretty decent job for the rest of the curve.
Approximately 2/3 of the population is below the average body-count (Shades of Lake Wobegone Schools!), that is, below 2.7X median. If you throw in humans' tendency to self-segregate and tendency towards confirmation bias, the most people will sincerely assure you that nobody who attends their church, is employed in their profession, works at their kid's schools or who they consider to be a "nice" person has ever slept with more than 20 unique individuals...except maybe that tramp, Nancy.
Totally disregarding 1/3 of the population has been with 20 or more individuals in their lifetime.
7% (one-in-fifteen) have been with more than 10X the median.
More than 1% have been with 20X the median.
Tying it back to miscreants
As humans, we map the universe with the yardstick we are most familiar with. Our distances and metrics are derived from our immediate neighborhood: Distance from our bed to the bathroom, from our front-door to the street, from the end of our driveway to the convenience store.
We think in terms of percents and multiples of those familiar metrics. The human mind can grasp percents and simple multiples.
The range of "evil that lurks in the hearts of men" is not denominated in percents and small multiples of the median. It is denominated in orders of magnitude. And the "extremes" are not in people far, far away. Those extremes exist in the people you share church pews with. People who frequent the same convenience store. People you work with and people who care for your children at school.
Perhaps a loose parallel: did not some criminologist determine that most (>50%) homicides get perpetrated (grammar ugh!) by something on the order of 10% of the identified, known-to-police malefactors?
ReplyDeleteI remember reading something like that.
DeleteIf my memory is correct, it was in the context of the intersection between drug-use and firearm related homicides. If you separated the populations into "Those where evidence of illegal drugs and alcohol abuse was present" and "Those where there was no evidence of illegal drugs or alcohol abuse", then overwhelming number of homicides fell into the first camp.
That shouldn't be surprising. Most homicides are crimes-of-passion, i.e. unplanned, spontaneous impulses. Not only are people with impulse-control issues more likely to abuse drugs but the drugs usually reduce what little impulse-control the people have.
A goodly percentage of those poor souls who are spiraling downward get to be know to the police because they do lots of stupid things.
Meh. The studies will always line up with the guys that paid for them. The trick is not getting an accurate analysis, it’s “cooking the data” to make it plausibly support a preconceived notion or narrative. Here though? Body counts? Hrrrrmmmmmmm.
ReplyDeleteWe need to define our causes and consequences. Is promiscuity a causal agent for malfeasance? Or is it a consequence of something else? Put another way: Suppose we see Mary. When it rains - she’s sad. She only mopes around and is blue on rainy days. It would make sense to assume rain makes Mary sad. But later, it turns out to be no such thing - Mary is sad because she likes to play in the garden… and she can’t work in the garden on rainy days.
I suspect something similar might be going on with your promiscuity vs. malfeasance graph. Is it valid to assume a statistical relationship between the two behaviours? I’m asking because I don’t know.
All I DO know is that in today’s political and social climate…pretty much any serious study of the problem will be impossible…
I never implied that promiscuity caused malfeasance.
DeleteI tried to imply that they were weeds that seemed to spring from the same kinds of soil...to extend your garden analogy.
One might get some insights into the characteristics of the one by looking at the population distribution of the other.
Pardon my me for misunderstanding but…that being the case the garden analogy still holds. Is it valid to assume a “relationship” between the weeds based upon the soil?
DeleteThe things you are using (the “soil”) are consequences that could stem from wildly different causes. Not saying you’re wrong… but I’d have reservations about it…
The quirky thing about how I had to jigger the formula to get the high degree of asymmetry is that I have a normal-curve cubed. You cannot simply take four normal-curves and multiply them together.
DeleteOne interpretation of cubing the normal-curve is that several factors are in-play and they synergize or somehow create positive-feedback systems that enhance the development of the other factors, which in turn enhance the development of the originating factor(s).
If I was teaching BS to newbie psychology students I would pontificate that the first normal-curve term, the one that is not cubed, is "nature" and that the one that is cube is "nurture" but I am not sure the factors cleave that cleanly.
Ugh. I finally met someone more knowledgeable than I am about statistical analysis. But… you’d have to slow down for me, Joe. I’d need to see the math, long hand with a full explanation of the variables. Then I’d have to look at where the info comes from and hemm and haww about that. When I start seeing asymmetrics and inflection points on graphs….i get very, very suspicious.
DeleteCan you try the same thing with, say, weeds that come from single parent families?
Statistics was a subject I didn't get into much. The ability to ask the right questions of the right group of people, then make sense of the responses is mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteAs you said, we know what is near us. I've seen horribly abused kids from the same family take wildly different paths in life. From murder to crippling emotional paralysis. And everything in between. All but one were promiscuous.
Dad was a peace officer. Old term, but accurate. He told me when I started junior high, "I arrest a lot of people each week. Some are this way, others are that way. Steer away from them, and you will have an easier time." I've found that true. There are practitioners of quite a few different proclivities that I actively avoid.
You sure can keep my thinker workin'. ---ken
ReplyDeleteA psychiatrist uncle (now gone) worked in a state prison system for 20 years. He wrote a research paper detailing how sociopaths in prison had an average of six children by various women. He wasn't able to get his research published, no one would take it.
ReplyDeleteLies, damn lies and statistics. While at times useful one should never get wrapped up in the numbers games that people like to play. Numbers are an indicator at best. Not a guarantee of reality. Not when it comes to the behavior of irrational and unpredictable humanity.
ReplyDelete