Although I'm sure there are men who have a sexual interest in 5year olds - it is shall we say a rather 'specialized' section of society.
However - what proportion of 25year old TAs have a sexual interest in 19year old students? Perhaps we should allow the men to be kindergarten teachers but ban them from being junior professors?
Actually in my new lab we got these nice new offices with big heavy doors. We got 'advised' not to be in a room alone with students, then we got 'advised' by the fire dept that we couldn't wedge the doors open - so much advice for one little physics dept.
I get your trying to be cute, but your example is pretty poor. One can reasonably argue that the Germans were either part of or led by the Nazi party. You could argue there hasn't been a gasing in 50 years. You can argue that they occurred in Europe (maybe you're in Europe, but just in case you're not).
I can't give you any reassurance like that. I can't say that men with college degrees don't do it. That it hasn't happened in the US. Or has happened at all in the past 10 years or even past week.
There doesn't exist an objective measure, that I know of, that I can use to rationally reduce risk. Now I've left this open, and clearly stated "that I know of".
If you can show me a key piece of statistical evidence that I've missed that will make this clear, I'd be happy to see it. And I will make an effort to avoid Nazi daycare teachers.
If 99% of abuse is committed by men but 90% is committed by family members - then worrying that a stranger is man is not logical.
The point of the article though is that an unofficial blanket ban on male teachers - in case they are abusers - makes as much sense as a ban on Muslim airline pilots, or on Germans in uniform.
The data I've seen (and cite/quote in previous posts in this thread) show that only 30% are committed by family members. 60% by out of family acquitances, like teachers, coaches, etc... And 10% by strangers.
There was a campaign like that in the UK - the kids were given dolls with somewhat impressive external genitals. If the kids touched the genitals that was evidence that they were being abused.
Apart from the fact that dolls of adults with penises are rather unusual and likely to produce an odd reaction - the same logic suggests my nieces are being abused by the lion from Lion king.
So rather than trusting your husband to drop your kids off in the SUV and worrying about the gym teacher - you would be safer letting them walk with strangers.
In the same way that "most accidents happen within 5 miles of home" is true but wouldn't be true any longer if you intentionally increased the amount of time spent driving farther away, if you made sure your kids hung out with a variety of strangers more often than with people you know, then it wouldn't be true any more than most of their abuse would come from family or friends.
At least, you can't deny that it's possible. In other words, your reasoning is wrong ("So ..."), no matter the actual truth value of your conclusion.
Suppose you are black kid in the inner city and none of your teachers are black, cos they might be criminals or a muslim kid and none of your teachers are brown (terrorists) - you might have some doubts about whether you can be a teacher or whether school is for you.
Not necessarily - groupon being on the internet and relatively 'cool' still doesn't have the public perception of a newspaper coupon.
I have used it to buy stuff at high end clothes stores (well Gap - but anything other than $3 black T shirts is high end for me!). If I ever needed more clothes I might go back to Gap, it did get me to go into a store I wouldn't have entered and was probably cheaper and more effective than them putting their name on a yacht race.
Gap is hardly the issue here. Most people who shop at the Gap won't really care if people wearing $3 black tshirts descend on the store every now and then and start wearing the clothes. For actually high-end products, making it more popular with the hoi polloi can mean the end of popularity with the original target audience, and the new market can often be more difficult to make decent profit in.
If everyone who heard about it on the internet could afford a Lamborghini, no movie star would own one, no matter how fast it went.
If your economics correspondent reckons there is more money to be made by not being in your newspaper then you have to start thinking about your business model.
The point Dubner made in the blog post is, I think, a valid reason to leave. It used to be that Freakonomics was a book with a follow-up blog trying to build/retain an audience for book #2. In that context, getting NYT to provide the platform makes a lot of sense. But when you're tossing in a whole lot of multimedia stuff and films and podcasts, it starts to make sense to run your own show.
Sort of like when you're starting up, it might make sense to run stuff on VPSes and shared servers and cloud or whatever, but as you scale, the incentives to own your own boxes triumph.
It could be that the business model is less suited to correspondents who have their own brand. Bringing the this particular blog into the NYT fold probably helped both a little but I am betting that the ongoing costs to the Freakonomics brand were getting to be a bit much (e.g. myself and probably thousands of others who dropped the freakonomics blog when the stopped providing full RSS feeds.)
Freakonomics is not in the newspaper. The newspaper refers to the print edition. Freakonomics is however in a profitable and highly trafficked web site.
The NYT web site business model works pretty well, but not enough to support the entire newsroom operations. However, the print side of the company still creates revenue to cover all that. The question is what business model will support that as print declines.
To your larger point I also disagree. They discuss their other ventures that they own (book, radio etc) which isn't owned or related to the Times. Therefore I'm guessing it's difficult for them to cross promote efficiently and drive people to different places. Moving to freakonomics.com makes perfect sense.
However - what proportion of 25year old TAs have a sexual interest in 19year old students? Perhaps we should allow the men to be kindergarten teachers but ban them from being junior professors?
Actually in my new lab we got these nice new offices with big heavy doors. We got 'advised' not to be in a room alone with students, then we got 'advised' by the fire dept that we couldn't wedge the doors open - so much advice for one little physics dept.