raveneye

The absolute numbers I'm referring to would be 86/M, 1/F, and 86/M - 1/F, where M and F are the total male and female adults present at any given time within that zip code. And to the 86 and 1 you'd have to add the number of men and women respectively who are offenders but were never convicted; that number certainly is larger for women than men.

All right, let's look at that belief. The total number of stranger abductions of children in the U.S. last year was 50. Tragically, all of those (to my recollection) either are unsolved or ended in the child's death. So the absolute probability that an American child was abducted by a stranger last year was about 1 in a million. (Incidentally, this number hasn't changed appreciably in the last 50 years, except to drop somewhat in the last few years.)

So: how worried/concerned/cautious/suspicious should we be about stranger abductions? Well, the number of "worry points" for this risk is 1 in a million, or 0.000001 on a scale from 0 to 1. Now let's assume that all 50 of those abductions were by males (I don't know what the actual number was). Now let's assume that the probability that a strange female abducts a child is 1 in 100 million (just pulling the number out of the air). That's 0.00000001 worry points.

So now the question becomes: how much more worried should we be about men than women on the basis of the child abduction risk? That's simply the absolute difference between the worry points for the two sexes. What's that number? It's 0.000001 - 0.00000001, or about 0.000001. So the amount by which we should be more worried about men than we are about women is 0.000001. My point: this number is absolutely, utterly infinitesimal. This number is so small that it is not possible to even perceive. How are you going to be 0.000001 more cautious?

The bottom line is that the probability that either sex abduct the child is infinitesimal. That means, mathematically, that the difference between the two probabilities is also equally infinitesimal, so the difference in caution should also be equally infinitesimal. It's a funny thing about tiny numbers: you can multiply them by 2, 3, 4, 5, 100 and they are still tiny!

So when you have these tiny risks, it is absolutely, utterly irrational to discriminate among people based on them, whether the discrimination is among blacks, whites, hispanics, socioeconomic groups, or males/females, or whatever. That's because within each group the absolute risk is tiny, so the differences also are tiny. The rational thing is to treat everyone identically when it comes to these risks.

Unfortunately, although this argument has been around for at least 50 years, since the burgeoning of the civil rights movement in the U.S., people still don't seem to grasp it. Or they seem to grasp it when it applies to discrimination against blacks, but not when it applied to discrimination against men in general, which is half the human population. It's a curious little piece of insanity in American psychology.

So I would say that this belief, that it's a reasonable reaction to be more suspicious of men than of women when it comes to stranger abductions, is based on a fundamental misconception about relative risk.

And I'll point out here that I'm not putting myself above anyone else here; I have pretty much the same unconscious biases as everybody. But for me, when I see myself acting on them, it pisses me off, or maybe even makes me feel ashamed of myself, makes me want to become a better person. I think we (emphasis on Americans in particular) do have a lot of evolving to do in the area of basic trust in our fellow man.