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A comment on The secret in my blood. Parent comment

Re:The secret in my blood by wycs on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:16PM (#17627044)
If you randomly select an HIV positive person from a Western country and know no other facts about them, it is correct to update your belief towards thinking they are either homosexual or a user of IV drugs. If their gender is revealed male this is especially true.

Obviously you cannot update this strongly if you are selecting from the global population but you would still update in that direction. Making these priors explicit is extremely taboo.

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Re:The secret in my blood by jacquesm on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:19PM (#17627064)
You are dangerously wrong. No, it is not true that > 50% of the HIV positive people in Western countries are either gay or use drugs intravenously.

It is that sort of stupid thinking that contributes to HIV spreading the way it does, after all: you are not a drug user and you are not gay, and neither is your partner, so what could possibly happen.

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Re:The secret in my blood by jacquesm on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:16PM (#17627489)
It appears my facts on gay HIV are off but on drug users they are on (for the west).

Globally the situation is much different and about the same number of men as women have HIV and drugs do not appear to be a big factor in to the equation.

It is interesting how the data has changed over the years, for a long time gay men were not the largest group but maybe with the increased effectiveness of anti-virals combined with decreased mortality the balance has shifted substantially once again.

In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic it was basically a disease afflicting predominantly gay people and only rarely heterosexuals. The two groups being somewhat socially isolated was an important factor in this. Then the balance shifted as more and more heterosexual people got infected and was made worse by people thinking that HIV would pass them by because they were not gay.

So now we have come full circle.

Still, 32% (at best) are pretty lousy odds so better be very careful.

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Re:The secret in my blood by refurb on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:42PM (#17627693)
Still, 32% (at best) are pretty lousy odds so better be very careful.

That's not how statistics work.

MSM and IV drug users are a small percent of the overall population. If you looked at the rate of HIV cases and divided by the respective population, you'd see that MSM and IV drug users are at a far greater risk of contracting HIV than heterosexuals (by magnitudes of order).

However, that certainly doesn't infer that heterosexual can't get AIDS and that they shouldn't seek to avoid it through appropriate measures.

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Re:The secret in my blood by jacquesm on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:50PM (#17627745)
Well yes, obviously gay people and drug users are not the bulk of the population so that 32% indicates 32% of all of those that end up HIV positive.

For the mainstream population that is a much lower risk than for a smaller group that has a roughly equal incidence in absolute numbers.

But that risk is still substantial, and you do not want to end up as an entry in the tally of that 32%, which is a substantial number of individuals, if approximately 4% is LGBT then maybe 50% of those (so 2% of the population) takes 68% of the cases, leaving 98% to divide the remaining 32%.

There are many lotteries with far fewer winners.

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Re:The secret in my blood by wycs on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:56PM (#17627334)
Yes. This matches what I found. Jacquesm writes with such assurance and from such a high ground. It will be interesting to see if he replies.
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Re:The secret in my blood by jacquesm on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:16PM (#17627494)
See above. I do have to eat every now and then :)
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Re:The secret in my blood by wycs on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:32PM (#17627188)
It’s possible I am wrong, but everything I am Googling seems to say that more than 50% of new HIV transmissions are among gay men alone. Perhaps this is changing, as I would not be surprised if extremely unsafe sexual practices are becoming more common among heterosexuals - and even a small effect here would have outsized impact given the relative proportions. I would be happy to adjust my prior on this if you have some accurate demographic information you would like to link to.
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Re:The secret in my blood by jacquesm on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:18PM (#17627513)
It actually has changed, in the West the balance has shifted twice now, but globally (esp. Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America) things are still as I described.

So thank you for causing me to update my prior.

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Re:The secret in my blood by boomboomsubban on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:36PM (#17627649)
It's possible that you're both correct. All those stats you link actually say around 50% of new transmissions are a result of male-on-male sex, which is later changed to "gays and bisexuals" in the reports. Those terms aren't exactly interchangeable, with some of the riskiest MSM groups may not consider themselves gay, such as sex workers, rape victims, and inmates.
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Re:The secret in my blood by refurb on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:34PM (#17627635)
That's not what the CDC says.

77% of all new infections are either homosexual men (68%) or IV drug abusers (9%).[1]

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html

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Re:The secret in my blood by influx on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:27PM (#17627144)
Source? For new USA infections in 2015 it was 77% drug users and gay and bisexual men.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html

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Re:The secret in my blood by kjeetgill on Friday July 27, 2018 @12:53PM (#17627316)
I don't want to argue the statistics, you probably know them better than I do. At least historically in the US AIDS:

> found its way to the United States as early as 1960, but was first noticed after doctors discovered clusters of Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia in young gay men in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco in 1981.

Please don't equate being a little under-informed or less up to date with stupid thinking.

EDIT: Ah, I think I mis understood your post. Your example at the end was of poor thinking but I don't the think the parent you had replied to was making that mistake either.

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