- Stephen C. on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “RLD: Thank you for your example of how I should have responded more compassionately to Robert’s inquiry. I do think your third paragraph is the key. By selecting for a person who is a boy in a family we’re already making an independent die roll, but the once that die roll comes up “male” then all the subsequent rolls are independent. Jared: It is kind of fun to see the back-and-forths; hopefully they keep it civil, sometimes they don’t. I seem to recall a back-and-forth about data quality in a particularly often used survey (Add Health) that had four or so back-and-forths in a journal, and things started to get testy.” Apr 23, 20:41
- on Christ and Community, 4: Let Your Light So Shine: “The secular case for the Church is important, since the Church has to exist in a secular society and needs to be legible to secular people and institutions. (Also, parable of the SOWER. It’s been a tough week for copy editing here at T&S.)” Apr 23, 17:32
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “I’m definitely wrong, though it’s not the gambler’s fallacy, and I suspect you’re right though I haven’t figured out the math to prove it. I grew up in a family with three girls and five boys, so I have three sisters and four brothers. The ratio of sisters to brothers (of boys) will always be higher than the ratio of girls to boys, just because focusing on brothers of boys makes one boy not a brother. But! Focusing on brothers of boys means we’re only interested in families with at least one boy. The expected ratio of girls to boys conditional on the family containing at least one boy is less than one. That means the expected ratio of sisters to brothers may well be one. Does the fact that we’re conditioning on the family having at least one boy exactly balance taking one boy out of the pool of brothers? It seems right, but I haven’t thought of a way to prove it. Robert, I’m so sorry about your friend. That’s devastating. I’m sure the answer involves more members demonstrating unconditional Christ-like love (it sounds like you did) and more of our LGBT brothers and sisters feeling the Savior’s unconditional love. That’s something we can and must work on independent of anything the Church does as an institution.” Apr 23, 09:10
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “Short answer no, that’s not a mathematical problem, but there has been a lot of discussion about the other issues involved throughout other T&S posts.” Apr 23, 04:32
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “Leaving the amazing math and analysis behind, I believe, based on my time in the church, mission field and BYU, there are a few extra gay men in our sphere. Post mission discussions with ex companions who are gay, members who are gay and married to women, and those deep in the LDS closet who exude a desire for male closeness, always left me feeling our gay brothers were above average in numbers. My close gay LDS friend who married a woman and had 6 sons, worried at least two of them were gay. He became so upset with his desires and secret lifestyle he eventually took his own life. Is there math to help us figure out a solution to this issue in the church?” Apr 22, 22:03
- on A New Look at the 1832 Account of the First Vision: “But not worthless enough to skip out on participating in them yourself, eh LHL?” Apr 22, 20:56
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “Thanks for those references, Stephen. Pretty lively debate it seems. I do like to see rebuttals of rebuttals in the literature. I’m afraid I don’t have enough background in stats to follow all the math properly, but the Vilsmeier criticisms seemed very well-founded on the basis of sample size and highly questionable selection of subjects. I can’t access the full article from Ablaza et al, but it looks like that massive data set from Netherlands will be hard to beat.” Apr 22, 17:29
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “For point one, I’m inclined to chalk that up to gambler’s fallacy thinking. If you wake up as a man in a family of unknown composition, you have a 50% chance of any sibling being a brother since the universe doesn’t owe your family a daughter to keep things balanced. I thought for a moment there might be a sort of Monty Hall problem (the paradoxical thought experiment that drove the statistics community crazy) dynamic at play but I don’t think that’s the casem, so I stick by my initial assumption of assigning half the siblings as brothers and half as sisters. As for point two, if I’m understanding you right, the average number of siblings isn’t just N-1, since families with more children are overrepresented. For example, if our entire population is two families, one with two children and one with ten children, you might think it’s simply (1 + 9)/2=5 (if we’re subtracting one for the reference individual), so five. However, each of the ten children have a sibship size of 9, so they’re overrepresented, so it’s actually (9+9+9+..+1), so around 8.” Apr 22, 17:16
- on Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II: “I’m not a demographer, but… If a family has N children, on average N/2 will be girls and N/2 will be boys. A boy will on average have N/2 sisters and N/2 – 1 brothers, because he is one of those N/2 boys. The number of siblings, F, is just N – 1, so N = F + 1. So shouldn’t the average number of brothers for a boy be (F + 1)/2 – 1 or (F-1)/2 rather than F/2?” Apr 22, 16:19
- on CFM 4/28-5/4: Poetry for “My Law to Govern My Church”: “Comment volume is primarily associated with controversy. Some of my most valued posts, the ones I’m going to bookmark for posterity, have hardly any comments.” Apr 22, 11:42
