Fascinating. A couple things that stick out to me-
1. These numbers are really human-sized. Pedophelia rates of 3.5% for guys -- that's like one kid across two coed sections of 11th grade English class was a pedophile. 1% of guys indicating interest in toddlers means that you'd have had 2 in a coed graduating class of 400. Ditto average p…
Fascinating. A couple things that stick out to me-
1. These numbers are really human-sized. Pedophelia rates of 3.5% for guys -- that's like one kid across two coed sections of 11th grade English class was a pedophile. 1% of guys indicating interest in toddlers means that you'd have had 2 in a coed graduating class of 400. Ditto average pedophilia scores being in the range of .1-.2... those numbers are large.
3. Numbers for some of these are certainly biased by the age distribution of respondents:
- The fact that men seem to age into pedophilia suggests that the prevalence estimates here are underestimates
- Percent having subjected nonconsensual sex is another thing that increases with age, so would expect that non-pedophiles aging into sexual assault would shift that line down at the full population level
- etc
4. That pair of "What age did you first have sex" by pedophilia graphs are so, so sad
> - The fact that men seem to age into pedophilia suggests that the prevalence estimates here are underestimates
Wait, did I miss something? Isn't the very obvious take that pedophiles are kids who become sexualized as kids, and so their sexual interests gel on other children, remaining on children in adulthood?
Ah... I glossed over that because I'm a gen-Xer, and all the ages registered as "young." The age effect does look genuine, given the enormous sample size, but still rather small, and it doesn't have the dose-response pattern medical doctors like to see when nailing down an effect from a drug. It's clearly different from the effect I proposed in my comment below - scroll down, or just recall what Aella noticed:
"People who report extreme interest in pedophilia also reported beginning to masturbate a full ~2 years earlier. And the highest pedophilia rating came from the masturbation-onset age group of 4 years old!"
Fascinating. A couple things that stick out to me-
1. These numbers are really human-sized. Pedophelia rates of 3.5% for guys -- that's like one kid across two coed sections of 11th grade English class was a pedophile. 1% of guys indicating interest in toddlers means that you'd have had 2 in a coed graduating class of 400. Ditto average pedophilia scores being in the range of .1-.2... those numbers are large.
2. Following on (1) -- the number of people it takes to make things substantially worse is not actually that many. See eg https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/new-york-city-fact-of-the-day-5.html for one way this can play out... or just think through the fact that the .6% of females + 3.5% of males who expressed any pedophilic interest are responsible for the fact that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse (from https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/ -- seems like it's mostly in the age range discussed in this stack)
3. Numbers for some of these are certainly biased by the age distribution of respondents:
- The fact that men seem to age into pedophilia suggests that the prevalence estimates here are underestimates
- Percent having subjected nonconsensual sex is another thing that increases with age, so would expect that non-pedophiles aging into sexual assault would shift that line down at the full population level
- etc
4. That pair of "What age did you first have sex" by pedophilia graphs are so, so sad
> - The fact that men seem to age into pedophilia suggests that the prevalence estimates here are underestimates
Wait, did I miss something? Isn't the very obvious take that pedophiles are kids who become sexualized as kids, and so their sexual interests gel on other children, remaining on children in adulthood?
ctrl-f males who reported being pedophiles were older
i find your mechanism intuitively appealing, but how does it explain sexual attraction to toddlers?
Ah... I glossed over that because I'm a gen-Xer, and all the ages registered as "young." The age effect does look genuine, given the enormous sample size, but still rather small, and it doesn't have the dose-response pattern medical doctors like to see when nailing down an effect from a drug. It's clearly different from the effect I proposed in my comment below - scroll down, or just recall what Aella noticed:
"People who report extreme interest in pedophilia also reported beginning to masturbate a full ~2 years earlier. And the highest pedophilia rating came from the masturbation-onset age group of 4 years old!"