Does it matter whether the number of children abused in the catholic church was higher than the number abused outside it?
Yes, it does matter here, since base rates matter in general.
Honestly, one of my criticisms that I want to share as a post later on is that LW ignores the base rates and focuses too much on the inside view over the outside view, but in this case, it does matter here since the analogous claim would be that the church is uniquely bad at sexual assault, and if it turned out that it wasn’t uniquely bad, then it means we don’t have to panic.
That’s the importance of base rates: It gives you a solid number that is useful to compare against. Nothing is usually nearly as unprecedented or new as a first time person thinks.
The base-rates post sounds like an interesting one, I look forward to it. But, unless I am very confused, the base rates are only ever going to help answer questions like: “is this group of people better than society in general by metric X” (You can bring a choice Hollywood producer and Prince out as part of the control group). My point was that I think a more useful question might be something like “Why was the response to this specific incident inadequate?”.
Yes, it does matter here, since base rates matter in general.
Honestly, one of my criticisms that I want to share as a post later on is that LW ignores the base rates and focuses too much on the inside view over the outside view, but in this case, it does matter here since the analogous claim would be that the church is uniquely bad at sexual assault, and if it turned out that it wasn’t uniquely bad, then it means we don’t have to panic.
That’s the importance of base rates: It gives you a solid number that is useful to compare against. Nothing is usually nearly as unprecedented or new as a first time person thinks.
The base-rates post sounds like an interesting one, I look forward to it. But, unless I am very confused, the base rates are only ever going to help answer questions like: “is this group of people better than society in general by metric X” (You can bring a choice Hollywood producer and Prince out as part of the control group). My point was that I think a more useful question might be something like “Why was the response to this specific incident inadequate?”.
That might be the problem here, since there seem to be two different conversations, going by the article:
Why was this incident not responded to accurately?
Is our group meaningfully worse or better, compared to normal society? And why is it worse or better?