Damned Lies Update

I claimed earlier that Jonathan hadn't responded to my debunking of his statistics. That wasn't quite true. He had nothing to say about it in the response he posted on his blog, but did drop a comment here. He seems a little bit hurt that I would have pre-emptively declared victory on the statistics front---and I confess that my remarks about assuming it to have been conceded were premature; but I've also been involved in these sorts of disputes long enough to know that nobody ever really concedes anything.

Well, that bit of laundry aside, the fact is that Jonathan has next to nothing to say in defense of his statistics. Here's what he does provide:

I am only going to post a comment on here rather than write a treatise on your response. I find the philosophical stuff more interesting than debating statistics. However, I do want to point out the main statistic of AIDS in the USA. -

"Of the 298,248 men (of 13 years or older) who were living with AIDS 57% were men who had sex with men (MSM)" - CDC (http://www.avert.org/statsum.htm).

You seem confused over which year I am talking about. But if you went to the link I provided, you would see that this statistic is not so mysterious as you make it out to be here:

"The 57% figure, however, is quite interesting. What would that figure have been in 1986? 1990?" [That's from my post--F.]

Actually, that is a CDC statistic from the end of December 2002. Pretty recent.

In fact, I did follow Jonathan's link, and that was the basis of my criticism---which I suppose might have been too oblique. I never doubted that 57% is an accurate figure for December 2002; the point is that in 1986 and 1990, years I selected randomly, the percentage of gay men out of the total number of men in the US with AIDS would have been much, much higher. Indeed, in 1986, that percentage would have been very close to 100%. So 57% represents a huge fall-off from the peak years of the epidemic. Moving on:

And as for your other comment about decreasing rates:

"Clearly, the rates of infection among gays relative to straights is decreasing, and this is not a surprise given the aggressive efforts at promoting safer sexual practices among gays over the last decade."[Me again--F.]

Okay, well I do not know where you are getting your "clear" statistics. But if we just stick with the CDC, they suggest that rates are increasing steadily:

"Even though the toll of the epidemic among injection drug users (IDUs) and heterosexuals has increased during the last decade, MSM continue to account for the largest number of people reported with AIDS each year. In 2000 alone, 13,562 AIDS cases were reported among MSM, compared with 8,531 among IDUs and 6,530 among men and women who acquired HIV heterosexually. (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/msm.htm)"

This statistic is astounding. Given that homosexuals make up 1-3 percent of the population and that statistic does not include lesbians. This means that heterosexual aids cases are roughly 15,000 wheares homosexual cases are 13,500. It is a bit early in the morning for me, but 15,000 cases per 2 percent of the population (gay men) to 15,000 cases per 95 percent of heterosexual men and women, seems like a telling statistic. That means that homosexual men are over 40x more HIV prone.

In my opinion, this cannot figure cannot be easily ignored. HIV "may not discriminate", but it is statistically consistent in the US.

Once again, Jonathan is amply documenting the fact that he doesn't understand statistics. First of all, he underestimates the gay population by a factor of somewhere between 2x and 10x, thereby repeating one of the errors of his earlier statistical claims. Homosexuals are in fact between 5% and 10% of the US population, although getting a precise figure is difficult and any estimate has to account for the "closet" factor. The reason this error is important is that it pre-emptively belies the outrageous "40x more HIV prone" claim.

Secondly, Jonathan doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between the aggregate proportion of gay/bisexual men in the total number of AIDS cases on the one hand, and the relative rate of infection among gay/bisexual men on the other. Of course gay men still constitute the largest percentage of total AIDS cases---for many years, they constituted nearly 100% of AIDS cases. However, their relative proportion among the total number of AIDS cases has been declining for years, whereas the relative share among heterosexuals has been increasing. This trend is even more obvious when it comes to new HIV cases, and it reflects behavioral changes in the gay community which, one might note if one were so inclined, are conducive to long-term monogamous relationships.

Thirdly, Jonathan's assertion that gay men are "40x more HIV prone" erroneously confuses correlation with causation (to borrow a cliché), and also disingenuously takes advantage of scope differentials. Let me explain each point individually. To paraphrase my earlier statistics post, I would not cite figures from the peak years of the black death as evidence that European Christians are uniquely prone to that disease. It's an empirically established fact, which no one takes issue with, that in the United States, gay men constitute a hugely disproportionate number of AIDS cases. But that does nothing to prove that being gay is a cause of contracting HIV. There is only one cause of HIV-spread, which is direct contact between the bodily fluids of an infected individual and a healthy individual. Being gay is neither an environmental factor nor some sort of magical determinant in the likelihood of an individual getting infected with HIV. Because the early North American cases were among gay men, and because the gay male community on the whole engaged in unsafe sexual behavior, huge numbers of gay men were infected. Nothing about being gay in and of itself led to infection.

Moreover---and to return to the point about scope---AIDS is only more prevalent among homosexuals when we restrict ourselves to talking about the United States. If the point is to show that homosexuality and AIDS are intrinsically linked, then we have to take a global view. And globally, as Jonathan would have to concede, AIDS is far more prevalent among heterosexuals. The idea that gay men are "more prone" to AIDS is a disingenuous fiction. People who have sex irresponsibly or use unsterilized needles, gay or straight, are more prone to contracting HIV than the rest of the population. There are no other factors.