Comments Elsewhere

First you said that 92% of men do NOT committ rape, then later say that in a room of 12 men, there’s a 92% chance that one of them a rapist. That makes no sense.

There’s no inconsistency here, just a calculation error. I made a dumb mistake in calculating the probability of at least one of 12 men in a room being a rapist if 1 out of every 12 men in the general population has committed rape. Here is the actual figure. If 1 in 12 men have committed rape, then the chance that there is at least one man who has committed rape in a group of 12 men is the chance that it’s not the case that none of them have committed rape. The chance that any one man hasn’t committed rape is 11/12, and since the probabilities are independent of one another the chance that none of them has is (11/12)^12, or about 0.35. So if you are in a room with 12 men the chances that at least one is a rapist are about 100%-35%, or 65%.

I don’t know about you, but I still don’t like those odds.

I question the validity of that really, but I’ll assume it’s true for the sake of argument. You said that you don’t know if 8% qualifies as a vast, overwhelming majority?

No, I didn’t; you misunderstood what I wrote. I questioned whether 92% qualifies as “a vast, overwhelming majority.” The answer is that “vast” and “overwhelming” are not precise modifiers for “majority.” Whether a particular majority is “vast” or “overwhelming” usually depends on the purposes you have in making a distinction between the vast majorities and the ordinary kind. If there’s a 11:1 ratio in favor of watching MASH instead of Cheers, it makes sense to say “Let’s watch MASH. The vast, overwhelming majority of us want to watch MASH.” If there were a car that exploded and killed 1 out of every 12 people who used it, it wouldn’t make sense to say “Why worry? The vast, overwhelming majority of those cars don’t explode and kill you.”

I’ll leave it up to you whether you think the stakes involved in the matter of committing rape are more like the stakes involved in danger to life or limb, or those involved in choosing the right teevee show.