From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: fetus vs. baby
Organization: Texas Instruments Inc
Distribution: tx
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:03:05 GMT

In <21363@rpp386.lonestar.org> jfh@rpp386.lonestar.org (John F. Haugh II) writes:

>In article <1992Aug12.200605.20461@watson.ibm.com> johniac@hwperform.austin.ibm.com (John Iacoletti) writes:
>>I came up with two scenarios:  She might not get pregnant in the
>>first place or they might get married before the baby is born.  
>>I don't have to prove a negative.  If you want to claim that there is
>>a one-to-one correspondence between premarital sex acts and
>>illegitimate births, you have to claim that the above two scenarios
>>have never happened.  One example is enough to disprove it. 

>No, your "example" doesn't prove anything.  Again, we have evidence
>TODAY that if you have sex at some rate <X> and you aren't using
>birth control, that you will ON AVERAGE get pregnant at some rate <Y>.

>The "Law of Big Numbers" (it's a real law of probability and statistics,
>just like "Gravity" is a law in physics) says that as the sample population
>grows, it behaves more like the overall population.  Applying it here, it
>says that as the sample number of women having sex increases, the number of
>pregnancies that those women have will approach the overall average for the
>population.  Thus a single coin flip will produce very skewed results, but
>100 or 100,000 flips will tend to approach 50% heads.  Likewise, if a
>large number of women are having sex, and we call this sample "The set of
>women who are not married and having sex", the pregnancy rate within that
>sample will approach the pregnancy rate for the entire population of women
>who are having sex, both married and unmarried.

I note that you quickly lost the 'at rate <X>' qualifier as you went
to produce your point.  Your assumption is that single people would
have sex at the same rate that married people do.  Not only is that
unsupported, it's untrue (which my abye why it's unsupported).  It's
untrue TODAY.

>It is UNREASONABLE to claim that some magical property exists which would
>cause an unmarried women to become pregnant when no factor other than her
>marital status distinguishers her from her married counterpart.  This
>isn't just Haugh Logic.  Unless "Marriage" somehow causes fertility to
>increase, there is no justification for an assumption that not being
>married and having sex DOESN'T result in the same probability of having a
>child.

Marriage generally causes that 'rate <X>' which you so blithely lost
to increase.  There are also a number of other factors that come into
play which make 'single' and 'married' different (unless they are
living together and single, of course).

>>Maybe because there's no such thing as a "sibbling", so nobody had one
>>at all. :-)

>I'm testing my spelling checker.

Well, it failed.  Perhaps you should acquire a logic checker, as well?

>>Usenet polls are so scientific.  Would you care to tell us how many
>>responses you got and what your margin of error was?  Remember I only
>>have to find ONE example.

>About a dozen.  Not being a scientific poll, the margin of error is
>+/- 100%.  Again, you have yet to produce the 35% population group that
>you claim was getting married right after the woman got pregnant.  And
>lest I remind you of statistics, if you select a random sample, you will
>find the ratio within that sample approaches the ratio in the overall
>population as the sample size increases.

In other words, your sample (even if it were not skewed by using only
Usenet to collect results and having only 'willing' respondents who
would reply to Email) is so small as to be meaningless.  Yet you still
attempted to use it as 'proof'.

>>There you go changing your story again.  You said that 78% of all
>>teenagers are VIRGINS, not 78% of all teenagers don't have sex.  If
>>you have intercourse ONE TIME, you are no longer a virgin.  By the way,
>>you still haven't said where you got your 78% number.

>Duh.  If they aren't having sex, they aren't having sex.  But just so
>you are happy, 78% are STILL VIRGINS.

Duh, there's a real difference between 'not having sex (today)' and
'never had sexx (a virgin)'.  One more distinction you tried to gloss
over. 

>Perhaps I should post while awake.

Well, it WOULD be refreshing.  :-)

>The article dealt with the need for school students to be taught
>"sex ed" and the like and was discussing how sexually active "school
>children" are.  The age group that was mentioned, as I recall, was
>12 to 18.  Being my usually imprecise self, I probably miswrote that
>as being "teenagers".  I remember that you said something about 19
>year olds, and it struck me as stupid since that wasn't what the
>report was about.  Most 19 year olds aren't in high school any more ...

You specifically asserted that 'teen-ager' was 11-19.  

>At any rate, since I'm not interested in digging through a stack
>of magazines, I'll conceed this point - obviously 10 year olds weren't
>what they had in mind and why the hell I pressed the issue about 10
>year old being a teenager is beyond me.

It's not beyond me why you did it.  But I'm sure you'll figure it out. 

>But the simple fact remains - "teenage" sex is not as common or as
>frequent as you make it out to be.  Even if 53% of 18 year olds have
>had sex, 47% haven't, and it is axiomatic that one year earlier, no
>more than 53% were.  Eventually that number must reach zero.  Those
>of us that understand numerical integration 

Gee, the rest of us are so uneducated, John.  "Those of us who
understand", indeed.


-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.