J_Taylor comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 02:52:32AM 3 points [-]

On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex.

Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.

Comment author: Vaniver 10 September 2012 03:08:54AM 5 points [-]

Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.

I'm pretty sure the 3% number comes mostly from women trying to get pregnant, and it's estimated that the per-act incidence of rape pregnancy would be about 8% instead of about 6% if none of the victims were using birth control.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 04:19:38AM 2 points [-]

Tentatively updated. Will investigate further later. 3.1 number comes from an odd data-set.

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/atniehs/labs/epi/studies/eps/question/index.cfm

Comment deleted 10 September 2012 04:03:26AM [-]
Comment author: Vaniver 10 September 2012 04:24:47AM 4 points [-]

It looks to me like your link is a 1995 study, and my link described a 2000 or 2001 study, which I'm having trouble finding. I think it might be this one but I'm not seeing the 3.1% value anywhere. The study I linked has slightly lowered my credence in the 3.1% number, but I can't tell if the numbers it's reporting are per-act numbers or not. (I'm not an expert in this field and have been trusting summaries from science journalists; I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the actual papers correctly or not.) It looks like this study might have said "at their least fertile, there's less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation, which is lower than we thought it was" and that got interpreted as "in general, there's less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation."

I hope Gottschall and company know what they're doing, and expect the 3.1% number comes from another study. It might be profitable to email one of the professors in question and ask for where that number came from, because it's being slippery.

Comment author: J_Taylor 10 September 2012 04:28:17AM *  2 points [-]

Sorry, for deleting my post. I linked to the wrong study (as you pointed out) and wanted no replies until I revised my post.

Also, this is the 2001 study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11376648

Edit: I would like to criticize Todd Akin for making my truth-seeking less convenient by really messing up the signal-to-noise ratio regarding this matter.