Truth is more realistic than fiction, and what this tells us about odious thought experiments

In 2010, economist Robin Hanson gained some notoriety by writing about “gentle silent rape”:

Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but the added rape would add greatly to the crime in the eyes of today’s law, and the added punishment for this addition would be far more than for cuckoldry. . . . A colleague of mine suggests this is gender bias, pure and simple; women seem feminist, and men chivalrous, by railing against rape, but no one looks good complaining about cuckoldry. What other explanations you got?

Hanson’s wikipedia entry contains this quote from Nate Silver from 2012:

He is clearly not a man afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. Instead, Hanson writes a blog called Overcoming Bias, in which he presses readers to consider which cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives might constrain them from making optimal decisions.

Taking these phrases one at time:

– “Cultural taboos” = attitudes that the many people have but which you don’t share. – “Ideological beliefs” = ideologies that many people hold that you don’t share. – “Misaligned incentives” = incentives for people to do things that make you unhappy. – “Optimal decision” = decisions that you approve of.

In any case, the “gentle silent rape” thing sounded like a bizarre thought experiment. But then a news item recently appeared in which it really happened: a man had drugged and raped his wife and kept it secret for decades. The result was neither gentle nor silent, which I guess might lead Hanson to say that this real-world case wasn’t an example of what he was talking about, but I would take this argument in the opposite direction and say that the real-world horror story demonstrates a problem with the thought experiment, which is that gentle silent rape isn’t really a thing—the phrase is a way of minimizing a real crime by giving it impossible modifying qualifiers.

The point of this post is not to have some sort of gotcha on Nate. Rather, it’s just a horribly vivid demonstration of a general issue with thought experiments in social science, which is that to work they should be internally coherent and also consistent with reality.