LogFAQs > #975212438

Yellow posted...

. I say literally every single official outlet, and authority is probably more correct than his Gamefaqs ass standing alone on this weird take, and he disagrees and says there is an even 50/50 split of men and women pedophiles

adjl posted...

I will also add to this and say that I'm not trying to claim that the gender distribution is actually 50/50 or that there definitively isn't a disproportionately high risk that any randomly selected man is sexually abusive.

Translation: "I didn't actually understand that what I read was dismantling my willingness to take statistics out of context without thinking critically about them and not an effort to prove that the proportion is different than what these statistics suggest."

The lesson you should take away from this is not that there's an even 50/50 gender split of child sexual abusers, but that you should avoid drawing and especially acting on conclusions from inconclusive data if you can avoid doing so. You can, in this case (and should, given that the statistics in question apply to maybe 1-2% of the population you're trying to judge with them), so basing your decision on such inconclusive statistics is poor decision making. Sometimes, intellectual honesty means recognizing that you don't have an answer. That is an acceptable intermediate between "I can't prove what I believe" and "I guess that means I have to believe the opposite."

The secondary lesson is to actually evaluate the sources you cite to make sure they've properly backed up their claims, because not a single one of your links - official authorities or not - did so in a publicly visible way. That's just a big oops.