| | : What statistics are you describing? Merely an estimate of the total number of professors? That doesn't demonstrate anything about proportionate crime.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 20:14, 4 April 2008 (EDT) | | : What statistics are you describing? Merely an estimate of the total number of professors? That doesn't demonstrate anything about proportionate crime.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 20:14, 4 April 2008 (EDT) |
| | :: The stats I cited, which were removed by you, were from a standard statistical source (see the original citation) and the very high number of professors that exist make the isolated examples provided in the article statistically insignificant. It would be interesting to compare relative crime rates for various professions -- then we'd be able to say that professors are more likely or less likely to commit crimes. I spent a lot of time tracking down those stats and was surprised that you removed them because of "liberal" bias. As my contributions to this Talk page show, I felt uncomfortable seeing ungrounded assertions about professors being disproportionately likely to commit crimes. The few examples are incidental and anecdotal -- they are not statistically significant and one cannot use them to justify the conclusion that professors are more likely to commit crimes than others. Plenty of crimes are committed by teachers, pastors, politicians, business people, and so on -- but no evidence has been supplied to show that they commit crimes less often than professors. I believe my statement was taken away not because it is inherently liberal -- it is attitude neutral -- but rather because the data seriously challenged the validity of the premise of the whole article. After a lot of reading on this in support of my since-removed contributions, I would imagine that, taken as a group, professors are much less likely to commit crimes than many other professions. To prove that, I'd have to do more research and document it well, which I don't have the time to do. The same should be done if one wanted to document that they are MORE likely to commit crimes, but for now those assertions in the article remain unsupported except by isolated examples. That is a very bad example to set for any students, home-schooled or not. My contributions attempted to raise the research standard of the article and I believe the data I supplied were inappropriately removed. [[User:CPlantin|Cplantin] 20:48, 21 April 2008 (CDT) | | :: The stats I cited, which were removed by you, were from a standard statistical source (see the original citation) and the very high number of professors that exist make the isolated examples provided in the article statistically insignificant. It would be interesting to compare relative crime rates for various professions -- then we'd be able to say that professors are more likely or less likely to commit crimes. I spent a lot of time tracking down those stats and was surprised that you removed them because of "liberal" bias. As my contributions to this Talk page show, I felt uncomfortable seeing ungrounded assertions about professors being disproportionately likely to commit crimes. The few examples are incidental and anecdotal -- they are not statistically significant and one cannot use them to justify the conclusion that professors are more likely to commit crimes than others. Plenty of crimes are committed by teachers, pastors, politicians, business people, and so on -- but no evidence has been supplied to show that they commit crimes less often than professors. I believe my statement was taken away not because it is inherently liberal -- it is attitude neutral -- but rather because the data seriously challenged the validity of the premise of the whole article. After a lot of reading on this in support of my since-removed contributions, I would imagine that, taken as a group, professors are much less likely to commit crimes than many other professions. To prove that, I'd have to do more research and document it well, which I don't have the time to do. The same should be done if one wanted to document that they are MORE likely to commit crimes, but for now those assertions in the article remain unsupported except by isolated examples. That is a very bad example to set for any students, home-schooled or not. My contributions attempted to raise the research standard of the article and I believe the data I supplied were inappropriately removed. [[User:CPlantin|Cplantin] 20:48, 21 April 2008 (CDT) |
| | + | : I looked for, but could not find, the edit you're describing above. But note that the frequency of crime is not the only issue; the nature of the crimes also matters. Also, it's meaningless to compare wealthy, pampered, highly educated professors to the general population in terms of crime. Any comparison would have to factor in demographic, privilege, and background info. |