Beverly Johnson: My Daughter Helped Me Go Public About Bill Cosby

The last time and only time I was surprised or disappointed by a stage/screen/tv star was when I learned to my dismay that Rock Hudson ( where the term “a man’s man”) I had apparently misunderstood or misapplied.

I knew that in about 1961, when did you learn it?

And he wasn't a serial rapist, just homosexual.

He died of AIDS at the age of 59. That was some time ago, before better drugs were in use.

Projection again Ansell?

Maybe you should write BS as a political hack.

I have no time to play with you tonight...I am going out to dinner with my better half...

So maybe by the time I get back, you will have found another adversary to play patty cake with..

Projection?

Would you quit rambling and try to make some sense?

You want to defend Cosby, fine, just do it, but try to make some sense.

If you understood English.....not sure you do...I said that I do not find the Cosby story to be newsworthy in any way.

With the exception of the supermarket tabloid reader you know, (the one with all the pictures) this story should be off anyone’s radar. It’s not important at all...

That’s what I said, inferred, meant....believe.

Does that make sense?....

probably not.....

You keep repeating yourself to tell us you aren’t interested, who cares?

How much of your time and effort, and emoting, are you going to continue expending on a Cosby thread, to keep telling people that you aren’t interested?

Not much.......only intended to make one post.....

But.......stuff happens...

How’s the Ebola stuff going...lol

I ditched the forum after it became clear to me that the issue was out of control here.....I have not made another post until today when I saw this stuff..

Gotta run,,,,,,

I am hungry for Mexican cuisine..

You ditched FR, when?

I don’t see a month when you weren’t posting.

You seem to be taking this in an unusually personal manner. Have you been accused, charged or convicted of a sex offense? Your seem to bee behaving as if you have a sex offense chip on your shoulder. Just observing.

The difference between such alleged so-called campus rapes and the allegations against BC is, of course, the latter involves only one perpetrator.

The following seems relevant. It is a discussion of what I (fwiw) would consider to be a variant of Bayes’ Formula, applied to situations similar to BC and his alleged victims.

According to Blitstein’s formula, the probability that the allegations against BC are true is considerable, even if one presumes that the probability that any one alleged witness is telling the truth is relatively low.

from

CAN COHERENCE GENERATE WARRANT EX NIHILO?
PROBABILITY AND THE LOGIC OF CONCURRING WITNESSES

James Van Cleve (USC)
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
22 March 2011
pp. 337-380

draft online here:

http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/69/docs/Can_Coh_Gen_Oct_2010.pdf

5. Blitstein’s formula
Michael Blitstein has proposed a modification in Boole’s formula that would get around
the true-false constraint (2001). The true-false assumption allows agreement to come too
cheaply: if both say “no” to the question “Did the defendant do it?”, they will count as
agreeing, even if under further questioning they would give very different accounts of
who did it and how. More impressive than agreement in their answers to true-false
questions would be agreement in their answers to multiple-choice questions, which in
effect is what Blitstein’s formula reflects. More impressive still, of course, would be
12 I address a further worry about independence in Boole in note 00 (approx 27).
14substantial agreement in answers to an essay question (provided it were not such as to
raise suspicions about independence!), but that is harder to capture in a formula.
Blitstein actually generalizes Boole’s formula in two ways: he allows for more than
two witnesses (which Boole could easily have done all along),13 and he allows for more than
two witnesses (which Boole could easily have done all along),13 and he allows for more
than two choices in answer to questions. At the same time, he simplifies Boole’s formula
by assuming that all the witnesses have the same level of credibility, so p = q. This
assumption can be dispensed with, but making it enables a more perspicuous presentation
of Blitstein’s ideas. Let k be the number of witnesses, each of whom has credibility p,
and let n be the number of choices in the multiple-choice question that is put to them.
Blitstein’s formula can then be written as follows:
w = . pk
.
pk
+ (1 - p)k /(n - 1)k – 1
As in Boole’s formula, the numerator and the left-hand summand in the denominator
represent the probability that the witnesses will all give the same correct answer. (If k = 2
and p = q, then pq = pk
.) The difference comes in the right-hand summand in the
denominator, which is meant to represent the probability that the witnesses will all give
the same incorrect answer, whether owing to incompetence (mass cretinism) or
mendacity (mass Cretanism). We arrive at this summand as follows. First, the chance
that a given witness will choose a given false answer is (1 – p) /(n – 1)—the probability
of his giving a false answer divided by the number of false answers there are to choose
from. In effect, this is to assume that if the witness gives a false answer, he is randomly
guessing from among the available false answers. Next, the probability that all k of the
witnesses will choose a given false answer (for example, answer b) is our previous value
13 In fact, Boole does present a formula for an arbitrary number k of witnesses, which in the three-witness
case would be w = pqr/[pqr + (1 – p)(1 – q)(1 – r)].
15raised to the kth power, [(1 – p)/(n – 1)]k
(assuming independence in some sense that lets
us use the special multiplication rule). Finally, the probability that all k witnesses will
give the same false answer, though not any particular one—that is, the probability that all
will say b, or all will say c, or all will say d, etc.—is by the addition rule the sum of (n –
1) terms of the form [(1 – p)/(n – 1)]k or, equivalently, [(1 – p)/(n – 1)]k
(n – 1). This
simplifies to (1 – p)k
/(n – 1)k – 1, which is the right-hand summand in Blitstein’s formula,
giving us
w = . pk
.
pk
+ (1 - p)k /(n - 1)k – 1
This formula reduces to Boole’s in the special case where n and k are each equal to 2.
In other cases, however, Blitstein’s formula has dramatically different results from
Boole’s. In particular, we can let the input credibilities be significantly less than 0.5 and
still get high final probabilities, provided either the number of choices or the number of
witnesses is great enough. For example, if the witness credibility level is only 0.3, but
there are five witnesses all giving the same answer from among five choices, the
probability that they will be giving the correct answer is .79. It can be shown that for any
initial credibility level no matter how low (just so long as it is greater than zero), the final
probability of a claim (that is, the probability of the claim given that all the witnesses
agree in making it) can be brought as close as one likes to 1 by choosing high enough
values for n and k. In fact, we need only manipulate n or k alone: for any p and any k,
the final probability of a claim can be brought as close to 1 as one likes by choosing a
high enough value for n; and for any p and any n (just so long as p > 1/n), the final
probability of a claim can be brought as close as one likes to 1 by choosing a high enough
value for k.