I'm interested in understanding why MR has such a high-quality comments section. I'd like you to consider this passage, from today's Guardian (not today's Onion), and try to write high-quality comments on it.
The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's
permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that
"available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were
involved in child sex abuse.
Let's see how you do. If you can indeed produce high-quality comments, it means you're better than the other blog commentators. If you can't, maybe it means that Alex and I are in some way better with regard to what we post and how we present it. In that case, once our splendid framing is off-scene, you revert to your usual, rotten selves. I want you to end up with most of the credit.
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1. Since nobody went low-brow:
…so Polanski says to the priest, “that’s what the hot tub’s for!”
2. People have asked about how much of the clergy sex abuse is a gay problem, but I don’t think anyone here has focused on the age of the victims. People who rape 6 year-olds are probably very different from people who rape 16 year-olds. Which group are rapist-priests more likely to go after?
For everybody who suspected this was a trick despite what Tyler said: the answer is two posts below.
As a psychologist, I think I can safely say this is the most confounded behavioral experiment I’ve ever seen undertaken with any degree of seriousness.
This experiment typifies the problem of many behavioral economics experiments.
Agreed Andrew John. The comments here generally are fairly typical for an economics blog — 10% insightful, 60% redundant/pointless and 30% dogmatic paultard astroturfing.
I’m still stuck, jaw gaping, at the “only…” portion of the quote.
The off-handed and dismissive tone that can easily be inferred from that statement is quite a slap in the face.
More significant than the population stastic you reported is this– each child was 100% abused.
I, too, am curious about the meta-level. Why would you inform us of the intention of the post, rather than simply posting it and analyzing the results? Every freshman psych student knows that subjects modify their behavior when they believe they are being observed. Secondly, by specifically soliciting comments you have increased the number of responses, which could have one of two effects: by people trying harder to comment intelligently the average level of comment might be better than normal (unlikely, in my view), or the increased number of comments will lower the average quality (given that under normal circumstances a self-selected level of decent commenters choose to comment, whereas the self-selection in this case has been altered by your intervention).
Surely, you, Tyler, have thought of all these effects (and perhaps many more), yet you chose to let us know we are under observation. What is your game, professor Cowen, and why have I spent 5 minutes of my life trying to deduce your true motive?
IMO Tyler was trying to get us to talk civilly about this topic.
It is very hard for me to believe that 1.5% of the general male population are child molesters. So does the priesthood attract them, I could see that, or make them, I could also see that, or both.
Why do you say this blog has better quality of comments? I mean compare to which blogs? My theory is blog of certain subjects always gets only people interested in that subject and hence comments they will provide will be more appropriate to blog entry. Rents and YouTube video kind of entries get comments from all over and hence poor quality.
Regarding whether this should have been a blind test: there may already have been a blind test.
Here’s a meta comment. The number of comments on this thread is significantly higher than on most other threads. That means the likelihood that the post quality is >= average is very, very low. And all the more impressive a statement about commenter quality if it stays high.
It’s the psychological Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work. You can’t measure something accurately once you ask people about it.
Moral concepts are best thought of as matters of absolute rather relative performance. To accept relative performance as the basis for moral judgements leads to conclusions that something is OK simply because everyone else accepts it. Some of the darkest moments of history are characterised by judgements along those lines.
Ostensibly the Catholic Church is an institution concerned with morality. It is jarring to see a morality-based institution furnish statistics in that fashion. It demonstrates its fundamentally relativist, defensive nature on this issue.
Ideally, our moral institutions would accept their moral challenges in absolute terms, without qualification, and be accompanied by pro-active intent rather than reactive, defensive responses.
Once again, a bad defense is worse than a skilled attack. If the best that an Archbishop can come up with is “only” 1.5%-5% there is something seriously wrong happening. I always figured Catholic child sex abuse was a big deal because of the hypocrisy, complicity, and weirdness of it all. But whoa. This makes me think it was a widespread and shockingly common phenomenon. Seriously, this completely changes the way I think about the issue in a way an outsider never could.
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