Month: April 2026

There are not 62 million rapists on that website

PNRJ current events, ethics, statistics , , , , , , ,

Apr 26 JDN 246157

This shocking story has been making the rounds: There is a website where men plan to drug and rape their wives. It’s being called the “rape academy”.

There is a factoid in the original reporting that has people especially shocked: The website that hosted this terrifying content had 62 million visitors in just one month!

A lot of people seem to be taking this to mean that there are 62 million rapists on that website—a number so huge that, since it’s just one site and there could be many more out there, would seem to imply that a large fraction of men—or even the majority of men—are in fact rapists.

But this is completely false.

That is not what that figure means, and it is an utterly preposterous claim to begin with.

I consider it deeply irresponsible journalism to report that 62 million figure without clarification.

The site that had 62 million visitors last month is a mainstream porn site. It seems to have very poor moderation policies, and as a result users were getting away with posting this “rape academy” content on it. But the number of users who actually participated in that content was not 62 million—it was not anywhere near 62 million. It was in fact only a few thousand. This is the difference between the population of a small town and the population of France.

The story here is not “there are a huge number of rapists out there and any man you know could be implicated”. The story here is mainstream porn sites are not properly moderating their content.

Of course it’s horrible that there are any rapists in the world. But that has always been true, probably will always be true, and ultimately all we can do is try to find ways to reduce those numbers while knowing that they will never actually reach zero.

Yet the public reaction to this story seems to have completely misunderstood this.

I am particularly disturbed by Greta Christina’s response (and she is someone that I greatly respect, and whose blog I follow quite carefully):

And every time I passed a man, I thought, “Are you one of them? There were 62 million visits to the rape academy site, in one month alone. Were you one of them? Are you, not just a rapist, but a calculating, plan-ahead rapist who conspires with other men on how to commit rape?”

[…]

Comment policy: Do not try to console or reassure me. Right now that feels like gaslighting. And if I hear one whiff of “Not all men,” I will block you so hard and so fast you’ll hear the explosion on the other side of the world.

She has swallowed this false narrative that it’s 62 million rapists, and categorically refuses to be corrected on that. In fact, she says that any attempt to do so feels like gaslighting.

In fact, since there were only 1,000 participants in the “rape academy”, the probability that any man Greta Christina has ever encountered was one of them is negligible. The probability that she encountered a man who had visited that porn site is considerably higher—but that’s a very different thing entirely.

Say what you will about porn sites; there is a lot of legitimate criticism to be had there. I consider myself a sex-positive feminist, and yet I still have a lot of concerns about how the porn industry is run. But millions of men consuming perfectly legal sexual content is a completely different thing from millions of men committing premeditated rape.

Moreover, Christina is far from alone in this. I have seen a huge amount of discourse on this where someone tries to correct the obviously preposterous figure, and then a bunch of people attack them for it, saying things like:

“If you are arguing statistics, you are part of the problem.”

Seriously? Trying to get accurate figures on the prevalence of rape makes you complicit in rape? Is that what you really meant to say? Shouldn’t getting accurate figures in fact be part of the solution?

The criminology statistics on this are very clear:

The vast majority of men are not rapists.

The reason that a large fraction of women are victims of rape (the best estimates are about 20%, though you’ll often hear higher figures from less credible sources) is that rapists generally rape multiple times before they are caught. That’s a big problem! It says something very bad about how our criminal justice system operates. But it absolutely, categorically, does not mean that 20% of men are rapists.

And yes, basically all women feel vulnerable to rape and try to protect themselves from it. So in that sense, all women are affected. But it doesn’t take all men to make all women feel threatened.

In fact, the best estimates we have suggest that about 8% of men have ever committed rape. That’s honestly higher than I would have expected (my guess would have been 5%). But it still implies that over 90% of men are not rapists.

(Since the world population is over 8 billion, half of people are male, and most people are adults, the 8% figure does mean that there are in fact about 300 million rapists in the world—but there’s absolutely no way that one-fifth of all rapists in the world are on a single website coordinating their activities!)

I don’t think this is really that hard to understand; it’s the same pattern as other crimes.

What proportion of people have been victims of theft? Probably the majority, depending on the seriousness of the theft.

And basically everyone feels a need to protect themselves against theft, locking their homes and cars, keeping a close eye on their valuables, avoiding dark alleys at night, and so on.

But what proportion of people are thieves? Maybe most people have shoplifted at some point, but in terms of real, serious theft, like stealing a car or breaking into a home? Only a tiny fraction. The reason that so many people have been victimized and everyone needs to be careful is that thieves do it many times before they are stopped.

In fact, it’s fair to say that this is more true of theft than it is of rape— much less than 8% of people are car thieves or burglars, and most rapes are committed by men known to the victim, which is surely not true of serious theft. But still, over 90% of men are not rapists.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all other men are off the hook.

I actually really like this chart (which unfortunately I was unable to find in higher resolution, because Threads wouldn’t cooperate and I couldn’t find it anywhere else):

I have some quibbles with the categorization, to be sure: Why does “men who think predation is an unfortunate fact of life” make you worse than “well-meaning men who underestimate the issue”? Surely in some sense it is true that predation is an unfortunate fact of life: We’re never going to get that number to zero, no matter what we do. We can hopefully make it smaller, but a world with zero rapes implies some kind of global totalitarian police state (and frankly an especially benevolent and competent one at that). But maybe the intent here is that these men think there is nothing we can do to reduce rape at all, which does sound bad.

Also, what exactly does “enjoy/consume/encourage predation” mean? “enjoy/consume” seems like it could apply to rape fantasy content, which isn’t illegal—and is actually extremely popular among both men and women. I guess if we mean men who consume and enjoy actual rape content (like the “rape academy”); that sounds really bad, but it also can’t be all that many men.

But in general, I think this is a much more accurate view than either the one which says that most men aren’t rapists and therefore don’t need to do anything differently, or the view that most men are rapists and need to be taught or convinced to stop being rapists. Most men aren’t rapists, but there’s still more that they could be doing to help.

If I had to put figures on these, my guesses would be about this:

  • Heroic men who would intervene: 10-20%
  • Well-meaning men who underestimate the issue: 25-35%
  • Men who think there is nothing we can do about rape: 10-20%
  • Men who think certain women deserve it: 15-25%
  • Men who passively consume rape content: 5-10%
  • Textbook predators we’re all aware of: 5-10%
  • Monsters so cruel we can’t even fathom them: 1-2%

This still means that the chart is skewed; the worst categories should be much smaller than the best ones.

I might even add a better category, men who have intervened, which would surely be much smaller than the category of men who would intervene—because, contrary to the apparent belief of most feminists, most men really don’t get a lot of opportunities to intervene to stop rape. Rape happens in private, and generally rapists don’t advertise that they are planning on it or even that they have done it. Out of all the men I know in my life, only a handful of them would I reasonably suspect of committing rape at some point in their lives, and I have neither confessions nor compelling evidence to support the accusation for any of them. All I can say is they seem like the sort of man who would be willing to commit rape. (One of them I’m firmly convinced is a full-blown psychopath.) So while I absolutely would intervene to stop them if I had the opportunity to do so, I simply haven’t ever had that opportunity.

Actually I think men are even less aware of which men are dangerous than women, because women seem to have whisper networks that share this kind of information, but they rarely think to include any men in those networks. Maybe they don’t trust us enough? But I don’t understand how I’m expected to intervene when nobody has even told me who I should be intervening against.

It’s also quite likely—in fact, I dare say, nearly certain—that my own social networks are not representative of male social networks. Maybe more conventionally masculine cishet men who hang out in clubs and bars have more opportunities to intervene against rapists. It’s probably the case that most men have more experience of other men bragging about their sexual exploits in ways that may suggest predation (I have almost never experienced this, in fact).

So here’s my updated chart (which I also added more colors to, to make it clearer):

This still means that there is a lot we could do to make things better—especially about the “men who think some women deserve it” and “well-meaning men who underestimate the issue” categories, which are (in my estimation) the largest. But it’s a far cry from “any man you meet could be one of them” or “just teach men not to rape”.

And it’s never a good sign when trying to correct egregious misunderstandings is characterized as “gaslighting”.

Wonderful news from Hungary

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 19 JDN 246150

Hungary’s recent election results were just about as good as they could possibly have been. Victor Orban was not only defeated, but crushed; Magyar’s party didn’t just win, they won a supermajority. They now have the power to implement sweeping reforms that could prevent authoritarians like Orban from ever taking power in Hungary again.

Already Magyar has suspended Hungarian state media broadcasts and released $90 billion in EU aid for Ukraine that Hungary had been holding up. These are immediate, concrete results from just his first few days in office.

I have two goals for this post:

First, I just want to celebrate.

This is a huge victory for democracy, not just in Hungary, but across Europe and indeed around the world. It brings hope in a time when we needed it most. It proves to the world that authoritarians can be toppled, and democracy can be restored—sometimes even without bloodshed.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. We must keep pressing forward.

Second, I want to use it as a model.

I think the biggest thing that this event teaches us is that democracy and nonviolence can succeed. This is something we should already have recognized from the empirical evidence, but rarely do we see such a clear, unambiguous example of a triumphant victory by nonviolent, democratic means alone.

Hungarians protested, and lobbied, and voted, and they did so in a united voice against Orban’s tyranny. But there was very little violence—and most of what there was, was instigated by the government against peaceful protesters. (Remember, nonviolence doesn’t mean nobody gets hurt.)

And once he took power, Magyar already began the process of reform. It will no doubt be a long and difficult process, and may take years to complete. Orban and his party are defeated, but not destroyed, and they will continue to mount resistance. But Magyar did not wait. He did not try to reconcile or compromise. He immediately set out to make things better.

This is what the Democrats must do when they win the midterm elections this year. They must not be timid and careful, not taking any bold moves to avoid upsetting “moderates”. (Anyone who still thinks Trump belongs anywhere near public office at this point is not and never was a moderate. At best, they might be a low-information voter who literally doesn’t know what’s going on.) They must act swiftly and decisively to repair the damage Trump has done and fix our system so that no similar maniac can do such damage again in the future. This is exactly what Biden failed to do when he took office in 2020. (Yes, I know that Congress and the Supreme Court fought him on a lot of things. But there was definitely still more that he could have done and didn’t, and people are suffering now because of it.)

Ideally, in fact, they would impeach and remove Trump before 2028. (And if it’s not too much trouble, try him at the Hague for all the children he starved?) But if they don’t manage to do that, at the very least, they must ensure that they continue to have such a strong campaign for Congress and the President in 2028 that they take both of those branches of government—and then, they need to pack the Supreme Court in order to secure the third. This damage will not be undone until Republicans are completely removed from the seats of national power, and stay removed for at least a decade.

Of course, in order for that to happen, the Democrats are going to need to win a lot of elections. And that isn’t just on them—it’s also on us. They need to run better candidates, we need to vote for those candidates, and we need to hold those candidates accountable for taking the bold measures necessary to repair America after this disaster. They need to stop taking their own electoral victories for granted: Yes, Clinton and Biden absolutely deserved to win all three elections. But they only actually won one of them, and that is what matters. The Democratic Party should be looking long and hard at what went wrong in 2016 and 2024, and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not even saying the Democrats are perfect; they are not. (Neither is Magyar.) But we need a powerful party to defeat the Republicans and restore American democracy, and only the Democrats are currently in a position to fulfill that role. After the Republicans are totally destroyed and only a distant, unsettling memory like the Nazis, then you can start voting for the Greens or the Libertarians.

And since “Magyar” basically just means “Hungarian”, maybe we should run a Presidential candidate named something like John T. American, just in case.

Inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 12 JDN 246143

I’ve had a really hard time writing a post this week. Between my late father’s birthday coming up soon (April 15) and the fact that a man with full authority over a full-scale nuclear arsenal threatened to destroy an entire civilization—a literal imminent threat of genocide—and the people with the power to remove him did absolutely nothing, the world just feels like a nightmare I’ve been trying to wake up from.

And yes, it matters that he has authority over nukes. If you’re in a fistfight and the other guy says, “I’ll kill you!” that’s very different than if he draws a handgun and says the same thing. The President of the United States should essentially be treated as always brandishing a deadly weapon, and it is his responsibility to have the decorum to not make statements that can be read as imminent threats.

This means that trying to be topical about current events is just too painful and disorienting for me to write anything that feels useful to say. (I mostly feel like screaming.)

So, perhaps ironically, I’m going to write a post that’s completely un-topical, that could honestly have been written any time between roughly 300 AD and the present, and—much to my chagrin—will probably still be relevant in 3000 AD if humanity survives that long.

It concerns the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.

Simply put, inerrancy is the belief that divine scriptures (especially the Bible or Qur’an) are without error: That is, that literally every proposition contained therein is absolutely and completely true.


This is not by any means a rare or fringe belief. 55% of Christians in the United States report that they believe in Biblical inerrancy. I was not able to obtain a similar figure for Muslims, but I can tell you that a majority of US Muslims and over 90% of African Muslims believe in the even stronger claim of Qur’anic literalism.

We can set aside the question of copyediting. I don’t care about typos or grammar mistakes. Translation errors are somewhat more serious—as they can affect real doctrines—but I’m willing to set those aside as well. We can say that we are talking about the original texts in their original languages, and idealized so that they do not contain any errors of grammar or typography.

This is already asking a lot, but I am prepared to concede it.

Even so, inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim that no rational person should ever take seriously.

The claim is that this entire text—hundreds of pages by dozens of authors over hundreds of years—is entirely true, without a single false assertion anywhere within it.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: I do not believe that about any text I have ever encountered.

I do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant. I do not believe that calculus textbooks are inerrant. I do not believe that Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity is inerrant.

I can’t point you to any specific errors in these books right now (especially since we haven’t even specified a calculus textbook), but if someone did point me to an error, I would not be the least bit surprised. Even if I combed through the entire text multiple times and didn’t spot any errors, I would still be doubtful that I hadn’t missed one somewhere.

Honestly, I find it improbable that any nonfiction work by human beings of significant length and complexity is completely without errors. (Okay, a 5-page book on counting for kindergartners might actually be inerrant. Maybe.)

Let me try putting it this way. What is the probability that any given proposition stated by a given source is correct? For a very reliable source, it could be 99%, or 99.9%, or even 99.99%. Perhaps you literally trust some sources so much that they must assert 10,000propositions before they get one wrong. (I’m not sure there’s anyone I trust this much—I certainly do not trust myself this much—but I’ll allow it for the sake of argument.)

There are 30,000 verses in the Bible. Many of these verses assert multiple propositions.

Even if each and every proposition is 99.99% reliable, the probability that all of 30,000 distinct propositions is correct is less than 5%. Even if you trust the Bible that much, you should still be 95% certain that it got something wrong somewhere.

In fact, it’s much worse than that, as we know for a fact that there are explicit contradictions between different parts of the Bible. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible counts over 500 explicit contradictions, some relatively trivial (did Enoch die?) but others absolutely core to Christian theology (do Heaven and Hell exist?). If even one of those holds up—and as far as I can tell, most of them hold up, maybe even all of them (though I wouldn’t be surprised if some don’t; are you getting it yet?)—then the Bible is not inerrant. Indeed, just counting contradictions, if 500 of 30,000 propositions are contradictions, then the accuracy of each proposition can’t be more than 99%.

We don’t even need the extensive empirical evidence that refutes the creation stories in the Bible to know that those stories are wrong. The creation stories themselves contradict each other in vital ways.

We don’t need to consider the vanishingly small prior probability that a human being can rise from the dead to take issue with the resurrection story. Simon and Peter can’t both simultaneously have known in advance that Jesus would resurrect and not known that until it happened. Jesus can’t have been crucified to death both before and after Passover.

Some of these kinds of contradictions are exactly the sort of thing you would expect to slip into a historical account that was delivered by oral tradition over multiple generations. (They do not, for instance, give me reason to doubt that there was in fact a historical figure named Yeshua of Nazareth who gathered a group of apostles and was crucified to death by the Roman state. The vast majority of historians agree that this man did, in fact, exist.)

But they are exactly what you are not allowed to have in a book that is inerrant!

A book that is literally without error, without flaw, should not contain even one single contradiction, no matter how trivial—and come on, whether or not Heaven and Hell exist is not trivial!

Inerrancy is not simply saying “the Bible is basically true” or “the Bible is a reliable source” or even “Christian theology is true.”

I believe that The Origin of Species is basically true, and a reliable source, and that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true. But I absolutely do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant.

I believe that most calculus textbooks are basically true, and are reliable sources, and that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is true. But I absolutely do not believe that any calculus textbook is inerrant.

Inerrancy isn’t even simply saying that “the Bible was written by God”! It’s very clear that the Bible is not simply dictated verbatim from On High; there was some kind of human process involved in its creation, and even if you believe that the Council of Nicaea was right about all their choices of the canon, you should still recognize that there is plenty of room for errors to have crept in during this long, convoluted, and controversial human process.

(For the Qur’an, we actually have mostly the original text by the original author—but even then, you should still be doubtful that any document with thousands of claims could be absolutely, 100% true.)

So, please, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else, I am literally begging you:

Please, give up on inerrancy. Admit that your book could be mistaken.

I’m not asking you to give up on your religion. You can keep your theology. You can still mostly believe in the book. But please, recognize how incredibly unreasonable you are being by asserting that it is impossible that anything in the book could ever be wrong.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your book could be mistaken.

A letter from the real singularity

PNRJ computer science, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 5 JDN 246136

I’ve been unable to find it, but several years ago someone famous wrote a sci-fi work entitled something like “A letter from the post-singularity” about how great life is after AI takes over everything. Today I thought I’d write a more realistic take on the path we actually seem to be on.

The year is 2073. Technically we still don’t have true AGI; as far as we can tell, AI still isn’t actually sentient and AIs aren’t people. (Some of us wonder, though. Philosophers debate it.) But that doesn’t really matter, because all white-collar work has been completely automated, and so has any blue-collar work that doesn’t require fine dexterity or unusual expertise. Plumbers and electricians are still doing all right (though they do more of their work at data centers than homes these days); sometimes I wish I’d apprenticed to be an electrician. Then again, the world can still only support so many electricians. AI managers command AI-run asteroid mines to extract ores to transport with AI-run spacecraft to Mars where AI-run factories process those ores and fabricate chips for more AIs that more AI-run spacecraft carry to Earth to be installed in AI-run data centers. And each time one gets sold, some trillionaire’s number goes up, and that’s the only thing people like him have ever cared about in their lives.

There are of course a handful of super-brilliant, super-creative, or just super-lucky individuals who manage to get rich making art or music or books or video games or whatever, but the vast majority of people who do art are still starving artists, just as they’ve always been, I guess. And the AI-generated stuff is good enough now that most of the time people will just use that instead of paying extra for the “authentic” “artisanal” stuff. (And most people can’t even tell the difference anyway.)

Harvard and Oxford still have professors, but most universities have fully automated teaching and most of their administration—and yet somehow tuition is barely any cheaper now than it was in your time, even adjusted for inflation. And if you were thinking of becoming a professor yourself? You should probably just go play prediction markets or something; you’d have better odds. The number of research papers published every year is astronomical, but they’re all written and reviewed by AI, rarely if ever even read by any human being, and so it seems like the actual progress of scientific knowledge has pretty much ground to a halt. (Seriously, how are there still string theorists? It’s been a century.) I guess corporate R&D still keeps on improving those graphics cards somehow; maybe they’ve discovered something important, but if they have, they’re keeping it to themselves. And I keep reading about amazing advancements done by AIs (especially in pure math that I’m not sure anyone understands), but none of it actually ever seems to affect anyone’s actual lives.

As for me, I live on UBI. Like 90% of people do. It’s enough to rent a cheap apartment (but own a home? Are you serious? Only millionaires own homes.), buy basically-adequate food (as long as you don’t eat out too much anywhere that’s not fast food), and pay for all the subscriptions to media services and home assistants and whatnot. What you make on UBI will only buy you the ad-supported versions, so while my fridge will order milk for me (delivered by drone in a couple of hours) and my robot maid will cook breakfast, fold the laundry and put the dishes in the dishwasher, my fridge is also constantly running ads and my maid will intersperse targeted sales pitches into its casual conversation. Sometimes I think I should just get rid of it (her?) and do my own cooking and cleaning myself, so I would never be able to sell it for half what I paid for it. If I could make some extra money, maybe I could at least upgrade to the ad-free subscription for my maid. (The Pro subscription and hardware addons to make her your girlfriend are just gross, but I’m sure they make tons of money.)

Every year, some politician makes a big deal about how the UBI trust fund is draining and will be gone in ten years or whatever; but it’s obvious that all they’d have to do to fix that would be raise the taxes on trillionaires a little bit, yet somehow that never seems to happen. But they also don’t cut UBI payments either, except sometimes to reduce our cost-of-living adjustments. I dunno; maybe they will really cut UBI payments in a few years. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll actually raise taxes for once.

At least I wasn’t dumb enough to move to Mars, where “employment is guaranteed!” but you have to pay a subscription for your oxygen.

My worst days are probably… about as bad as your worst days. Frankly they couldn’t be much worse, because sometimes I just want to die. Like a lot of people on UBI, I feel like a burden on society, like the world would be better off without me. Medicaid won’t cover neuroregulator implants, so I still take pills for my depression; they’re probably better than the pills you could get, but they’re still far from perfect.

My best days are maybe better than yours, maybe worse; it depends, I guess. If you’ve got cancer, your days are probably worse than mine, because we can pretty easily treat most cancers now. But if you’re healthy and you’ve got a steady job and a tight-knit community where you live, I’m guessing your days are better.

I have access to faster computers and faster Internet than you can probably imagine; my understanding was that back in the day you had to wait for downloads sometimes? Or even sometimes wait for webpages to load? What was that like? And your storage was measured in gigabytes, not petabytes? Humanity has never been so connected; human beings have never been so isolated. I theory I can contact anyone in the Solar System at the speed of light, but in practice my friends and I always seem to have trouble keeping in touch. (Oddly, it’s my best friend who lives on a station over Ganymede that I seem to stay in touch with best; we have to write full-length emails, because there’s no way to have a conversation on a ping of an hour and a half. It feels like being an old-timey pen pal, I guess.)

It’s not all bad. Some things are definitely better these days.

People often live to be 110 or even 120 nowadays. (So you might still be alive when I write this.) Rarely does anyone seem to make it past that, though; aging is just… really hard to beat. (The Boomers are finally almost gone, but Gen X is still gonna be with us for awhile yet.) We’ve cured a lot of the diseases that were bad in your time, but not all of them. And sometimes only people rich enough to pay for their own healthcare can afford the cures.

Language barriers are pretty much gone. If I wanna read something that was written in Japanese or Xhosa, I just have an AI translate it, and the translations are good enough now that you’d have to be really deeply-versed in the language to find any problems with it. Like, okay, maybe I’m not getting all the subtle connotations of Japanese literature, but was I ever going to actually learn kanji to read the originals? No. That kind of thing is for people with crazy obsessions.)

Our video games are definitely way better than yours. Characters with AI personalities that adapt in real time to how you behave. Procedurally-generated open worlds that can literally expand to the size of entire planets. (Actually, I vaguely remember reading you had a couple games that did something like the second one? Minecraft and Factorio​, I think they were called? Impressive that you could pull that off on a gigaflop processor.) Worlds and factions that adapt to your actions and provide realistic consequences so that no two players’ experiences of the game are exactly the same. It’s easy to lose yourself in a game like that (especially if you’ve got a VR setup), and when you’re playing in such a rich, interesting world for hundreds of hours. you can sometimes forget how bleak things are back in the real world your flesh-and-blood body lives in. (But then you get hungry or have to pee and you get forced back into reality.)

Economists keep telling us that per-capita GDP and productivity have never been higher, and that we have access to all these wonderful goods and services that previous generations could scarcely even imagine.

But if that’s true, why do I sometimes just want to die?