Your analogy is not at all applicable. According to the American Cancer Society, men should start considering getting a prostate exam at age 50. Therefore if a 23 year old male is NOT getting a prostate exam, then he is doing exactly the right thing and still has a low risk of prostate cancer.
However, adults of ANY age who are sexually active (again, excluding monogamy, if you want), SHOULD be getting tested for STDs. Therefore if a sexually active 23 year-old female is not getting tested for STDs then she is NOT behaving responsibly, and has a much higher risk of having an STD than the older female, who has had more partners, but is tested regularly.
You’re disputing a contingent aspect of the analogy that isn’t related to the problem with the OKCupid article.
To establish that “older people get tested more → older people have less undetected disease”, you first have to establish that older people started out with the same base rate of disease as younger people. The OKCupid article doesn’t do that, and knb is correctly calling them out on it.
I agree that younger people in fact have higher STD rates than older people, but OKCupid makes a fallacious argument for this, and it is acceptable in philosophy to criticize fallacious arguments for true conclusions.
Well, that’s just nitpicking. The implicit assumption (that young women aren’t much less likely a priori than old women to have STDs) is so uncontroversial that it’s not such a fatal mistake to not make it explicit. For that matter, it doesn’t make explicit the assumption that ceteris paribus people would prefer not to have STDs, either.
Your analogy is not at all applicable. According to the American Cancer Society, men should start considering getting a prostate exam at age 50. Therefore if a 23 year old male is NOT getting a prostate exam, then he is doing exactly the right thing and still has a low risk of prostate cancer.
However, adults of ANY age who are sexually active (again, excluding monogamy, if you want), SHOULD be getting tested for STDs. Therefore if a sexually active 23 year-old female is not getting tested for STDs then she is NOT behaving responsibly, and has a much higher risk of having an STD than the older female, who has had more partners, but is tested regularly.
tl;dr- Base rates
You’re disputing a contingent aspect of the analogy that isn’t related to the problem with the OKCupid article.
To establish that “older people get tested more → older people have less undetected disease”, you first have to establish that older people started out with the same base rate of disease as younger people. The OKCupid article doesn’t do that, and knb is correctly calling them out on it.
I agree that younger people in fact have higher STD rates than older people, but OKCupid makes a fallacious argument for this, and it is acceptable in philosophy to criticize fallacious arguments for true conclusions.
Well, that’s just nitpicking. The implicit assumption (that young women aren’t much less likely a priori than old women to have STDs) is so uncontroversial that it’s not such a fatal mistake to not make it explicit. For that matter, it doesn’t make explicit the assumption that ceteris paribus people would prefer not to have STDs, either.