So I'm kind of confused about what an "Ableist" exactly means.
- Thread starter Spider RedNight
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MarsAtlas said:
So the absence of hatecrime means that there's lots and lots of hatecrime? Hahaha, I must have missed that class in statistics (hint: lots and lots of stuff goes underreported/overreported, swaying the numbers in directions neither you nor I have an inkling of). I do like how you throw in a black and white right/wrong topic though, it really nets you the moral high ground and kinda makes me forget about the outrageous claim.
Submit this to Donald Trump's campaign office and he'll hire you on the spot.
Well then, let me show you how I see it.Silvanus said:
Some dude/tte said
At which point a dude/tte responded with
Now, I read that as the second dude/tte refuting the claims of the first dude/tte, thus the the context is that the numbers are wrong because of, very specifically here, underreporting of hatecrime. That is, the percentage should be significantly higher than it is. This is based on a statement from the FBI that hatecrime goes underreported. How do you see it?
It's also not helpful. If hate crime is under reported then it could be for no other reason then crime in general is under reported. If the goal is to show that hate crime is especially problematic, then one would need to show that the rate of under reporting is significantly higher than in crime in general and/or that it makes a significant portion of crime. Neither MarsAtlas nor you(and links provided by same) addressed that.Silvanus said:
And even if it had been shown, you only brought it up as an indicator of racism not being rare, which wouldn't be necessarily true either.
It would be difficult to provide statistics for something definitively about an issue going unrecorded, would it not?LetalisK said:
What we do have are the attestations and studies of the authorities on the issue: inspectors, the EHCR and other charities, researchers.
http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/publication/lgb-and-t-hate-crime-reporting-identifying-barriers-and-solutions
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/33229789/lgbt-people-experience-hate-crime-too-often-to-report-to-police
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21865264
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/cahr/documents/Hate%20crime%20barriers%20report%20PRINT.pdf
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politics-law/politics-policy-people/society-matters/race-and-hate-crime-go-unreported-because-people-believe-police-will-do-little
No, the numbers themselves show that.LetalisK said:
You have again firmly established that hate crime is under-reported. No one is arguing against that. What is being argued is the under-reporting of hate crimes in relation to under-reporting of crimes in general. In order to do that, you have to compare under-reporting of hate crimes to under-reporting of crimes in general. As far as I could tell, none of your links did that(well, I actually don't completely know about the first one. I went through the conclusions.) Please pull the quotes out of the link if I am incorrect in this.Silvanus said:
I don't doubt there is some correlation between racism and hate crime in a society, but it's not the only relationship at play here and shouldn't be used as a sole indicator. A hate crime by definition requires both a racist element and a criminal element, so looking at just one of the variables is going to be misleading. As an example, a society could be highly racist, but have low criminality or it could have low racism, but high criminality. In such a case the latter might even have a higher rate of hate crime then the former, but it's a function of the higher criminality despite having lower racism.
Also, I know there are more hate crimes then those based on race. I'm using race as an example.
Each of the reports identifies various reasons for the phenomenon that apply exclusively, or uniquely, to hate crime, and not to regular crime.LetalisK said:
A few specific quotes as requested;
York University Report said:
Open University said:
Well, that would be very pertinent if we were doing a cross-cultural analysis, but that's not my aim. My aim was solely to show that incidence is high, and that prejudice constitutes a significant problem for people (something I didn't think would be contested, honestly). Numbers are more than enough for that.LetalisK said:
Where does it show either hate crime or crime in general under-reporting rates in this quote? There isn't even a number in that quote outside of the year.Silvanus said:
Where does it show general crime under-reporting rates in this quote? Having hate crime under-reporting rates is a good start, but it's not useful if you don't have the other to compare it to.Open University said:
1) You don't get to talk about how numbers are more than enough for anything when you are only providing half of the relevant numbers for your argument. 2) How do you know the incidence is high? For everything you've provided we still don't know if hate crimes occur at 0.5x, 1.3x, 2.7x or 4x the normal rate, as examples. Which is it? Say point blank "Hate crimes occur at ____ the rate of normal crimes". That is the only blank you have been asked to fill. Posting more links about all the possible reasons why the rate is different doesn't mean anything to the question of what the actual difference is.
I stated that I was not offering a number, because a number would be impossible when the very issue we're discussing is definitively about incidents going unrecorded. The quote refers to issues which affect hate crimes in a unique way, and a way which cannot be equally applied to all crime.LetalisK said:
The argument that the incidence of hate crime is high only requires numbers on the incidence of hate crime, which have been provided.LetalisK said:
A comparison to the rate of crime as a whole is utterly meaningless. We may as well be arguing that murder is not a significant issue, because peoples' phones are stolen more often.LetalisK said:
That's not being facetious; it would be a completely meaningless metric to use. To analogise: imagine that a small population (for the sake of argument, 10%) suffer more frequently from influenza. I may claim that the incidence of influenza is high among this population. The only pertinent number is the rate of infection.
It would be irrational to attempt to refute this by stating that influenza cases among this population only constitute a small percentage of all diseases. Well, obviously: the latter number there is a completely unrelated one, and with a far larger population.
Edit: Go to the bolded edit first.
Also, yes, there are issues that affect hate crimes in a unique way and cannot be equally applied to all crime(which several of the articles you linked do a poor job of showing, but I'll only get into that if you want me to). That has not been contested. But it also doesn't follow that hate crime rates are necessarily higher simply because of that. Unique issues can mean it's worse, but that's not always the case.
Edit: To take it back to the CSEW, they report that only 15% of hate crimes are reported. Is that more or less than the report rate for crimes in general? Specifically, is that more than the report rate for equivalent non-hate crimes(ie assault as a hate crime vs assault as a non-hate crime)?
Even more edits from the edit above and bolded for importance: Oooooh...is that the issue? Did I give the impression that in "crimes in general" that I was including crimes that did not have hate crime analogues? It makes sense that it would be taken that way. I sincerely apologize as that is not what I intended. I'll call them non-hate crime analogues from now on. Does "NHCA" work so I don't have to type that out every time? And as a side question, is there the reverse where there is a hate crime that does not have a NHCA?
But you have provided numbers about hate crime under-reporting. From your links:Silvanus said:
So we do have these estimated numbers for hate crimes, but don't have them for crime in general?
Also, yes, there are issues that affect hate crimes in a unique way and cannot be equally applied to all crime(which several of the articles you linked do a poor job of showing, but I'll only get into that if you want me to). That has not been contested. But it also doesn't follow that hate crime rates are necessarily higher simply because of that. Unique issues can mean it's worse, but that's not always the case.
Then your "high" is meaningless. It could apply to hate crimes consisting of 50% of the crime rate or 0.00001% of the crime rate.
Comparing two different criminal acts themselves is not the same as comparing crimes differentiated by their motivation. You could even control for specific crimes if you felt there was an imbalance in the types of hate crimes committed vs normal crime.
And you would have to have numbers of both the subset and the general population to know that the subset does in fact get the flu more then everyone else. To say something is "more" or "less" is inherently to compare it to something else. You can't just say "5 is more" without also referring to a second thing. It's nonsense. 5 is more than 2.
Edit: To take it back to the CSEW, they report that only 15% of hate crimes are reported. Is that more or less than the report rate for crimes in general? Specifically, is that more than the report rate for equivalent non-hate crimes(ie assault as a hate crime vs assault as a non-hate crime)?
Even more edits from the edit above and bolded for importance: Oooooh...is that the issue? Did I give the impression that in "crimes in general" that I was including crimes that did not have hate crime analogues? It makes sense that it would be taken that way. I sincerely apologize as that is not what I intended. I'll call them non-hate crime analogues from now on. Does "NHCA" work so I don't have to type that out every time? And as a side question, is there the reverse where there is a hate crime that does not have a NHCA?
Good, because I have not done that. I've specifically asked about the rate(or frequency of influenza, as per your example), which is used as a control for difference in population size.
Not at all. You see, the basics of propositional logic states that with an implication a -> b one can derive b if a. Thus, if a = "I own a car" implies b = "I have a driver's license", one can logically infer b from knowing a. Nice, right?Silvanus said:
Now let's go through the stuff again.
The claim:
The refutation:
We've agreed on reading the exchange similarly, which is a nice way to start.
So, why does the refutation implicate that the absence of data means lots of hatecrime?
The statistics are there to read, not much to argue I think.
The refutation of the statistics suggests that because of underreporting, the numbers should be higher. But to reach any remotely relevant proportion in the statistics, the numbers would have to go way, way, way up (this is what we would call power were this an actual study, lest the current numbers be a possible sampling of the actual distribution).
The underreporting would have to be beyond extreme given the proportion. This is further befuddled since underreporting is far from unique to hatecrime[footnote]Bigass report from BJS, check out page 27 for a sample comparison of reported and unreported incidence [http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/descrbncvs.pdf][/footnote], and all other crimes would have to be corrected for underreporting to present an accurate picture (I'm including here mis-reporting crime type A as crime-type B as well[footnote]LA Times article on misreporting 14,000 serious assaults [http://www.latimes.com/local/cityhall/la-me-crime-stats-20151015-story.html][/footnote]).
This means that not only would hatecrime have to be extremely underreported, it would have to be far more so than other areas of crime. This is an extraordinary implication of the claim made.
Since no numbers were provided, the only thing to go on is the absence of data, reinforced by the reliance on the underreporting phenomenon in the post. Hence, I got "the absence of (reported) data proves the severity of underreporting hatecrime", which is the same as "the absence of (reported) hatecrime means that there's lots and lots of hatecrime", i.e. a = "absence of reported data" and b = "lots and lots of hatecrime".
Do you see my reasoning?
Ahh, I think that may have been a source of confusion, yeah. 'NHCA' works for me.LetalisK said:
NHCA might be... assault, harassment, incidents such as those, then. Minority people and majority people will experience non-hate crimes at roughly the same rate, though-- but the demographics which suffer hate crimes will be suffering those as well as NHCA.
Let's take statistics as far as they can take us with this in mind, anyway; according to the CSEW [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/467366/hosb0515.pdf], there were approximately 222,000 incidents of hate crime in England and Wales per year 2012-2015, accounting for about 3% of all crime recorded by the CSEW, not just NHCA. If we adjusted for NHCA (which I can't find a good way to do at the moment), the percentage would undeniably be a great deal higher. On top of that, keep in mind that the population affected by that 3% is a much smaller one than the general populace, so those incidents will be much more commonplace within that population.
You mean "subjective", not meaningless. Making a value judgement was unavoidable. If you feel it's low, feel free to argue that.LetalisK said:
How condescending.Fallow said:
Only if we accept the metric, which was hate crime as a proportion of all crime. That's an absolutely ludicrous metric Lady Larunai threw out.Fallow said:
Yes, though it's tremendously specious from the "hence" onwards. The absence of numbers doesn't mean you're therefore using the absence itself as the supporting evidence; that's just patently absurd. The phenomenon of underreporting is still the supporting evidence for the proposition; the absence of numbers is a weakness of that evidence, not the evidence itself.Fallow said:
Ha, I read that in Professor Snape's voice. Well played.Silvanus said:
Is it? There's a reason proportions are always used in academic publications when discussing matters of a finite-exposure population (both study-population specific and, if possible, total population-specific - the so-called general prevalence). In order to filter out population-specific biases towards crime (such as size of the population or wealth of the population) one should look at specific crime as a proportion of the total. How would you compare the crime rates of Canada and Mexico without using proportions? How can anyone get an idea of the prevalence of a specific crime without knowing the size of the sample?
Calling this "an absolutely ludicrous metric" is contrary to the entire field of epidemiology. Even the first epidemiological study recorded[footnote]John Snow blames polluted water for cholera epidemic [http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/fatherofepidemiology.html][/footnote] (that of finding the source of cholera in London) relied on proportions.
The phenomenon of underreporting is not evidence of any kind, it's only a theory without the numbers. For all you know it could be 1, for all I know it could be a trillion. Saying "numbers may or may not exist in favour of my refutation" is not evidence. Adding in what I wrote earlier about all other crime and reporting and the argument becomes silly.
You cannot make any claim with that alone, you need to actually have something to go by. You cannot refute any statistic with it. Thus, claiming that the statistics are incorrect because the unknown unreported crimes are that many would require some form of evidence as support.
I did not say it was ludicrous to use proportions in statistical analysis. Obviously that's not the case. I said it was ludicrous to judge hate crime as a proportion of all crime, for reasons that have been stated before: the numbers are unrelated; the population sizes are incomparable (though the latter reason there is relatively unimportant in comparison with the former).Fallow said:
Crime encompasses petty theft, vandalism, embezzlement, insider trading, and a million others. We could look at any individual crime-- the analogy I used before is murder-- and deem that it represents an insignificant proportion of all crime. That's meaningless; it's about as meaningful as stating that crime represents an insignificant proportion of all events. Hell, going by that metric, hate crime becomes less severe the more we criminalise other things, because the proportion it represents shrinks!
We know underreporting exists (no thinking person disputed this, and it's been attested by the authorities on the issue). We don't know the extent, but we know it exists.Fallow said:
So, yes, it is a factor. The fact that we don't know the numbers is a weakness of that evidence. Regardless, nobody was using the absence itself as evidence; that was pure misrepresentation.
Of course population sizes are comparable, that's why we do the whole proportion and scaling thing.Silvanus said:
Hatecrime is a category of crimes, like violent crime or financial crime. You can scale that to populations by taking number of victims as a proportion of the available victim population and compare it to another category by doing the same there.
If you need more detail, you can scale the populations by age-to-victim probabilities and so on.
You can do all kinds of fun stuff with statistics.
Of course, that relies on hatecrime being bounded by availability of victims, which seems overly pessimistic. If we don't separate the category from the others we make the assumption that hatecrime is not limited by availability of perpetrators and victims, nor that we have to specify perp-to-victim relations. That is also an imperfect solution, but far from a gamebreaker. Thus, using proportions make perfect sense.
And that is exactly it. We don't know the extent. If we don't know the extent, how can you claim it's significant? How can you say it's a factor when you don't know? And, since hatecrime does not exist in a vacuum, how can you claim that it's a significant factor in relation to the underreporting of every other crime? If all crime is underreported by 30% then your factor is 1.0.