A moment of panic is perfectly rational.
What I consider irrational is using that story as an example to illustrate how dangerous the world is.
In retrospect, the moment of panic turned out to be unfounded in that particular instance.
While that doesn’t mean that there are no sexual predators, that should decrease rather than increase a rational person’s estimate of how likely it is for a strange man to be a sexual predator.
Simple Bayesian estimation:
P(the next strange man I meet will be a sexual predator) > P(the next strange man I meet will be a sexual predator | I gave the last strange man I met every opportunity and he still turned out harmless)
Given that the vast majority of cases of sexual assault happen among people who know each other and even within families, the estimate of “1 in 30” is probably too high in this context. And I think that most people’s estimate of the frequency of “predatory strangers” way too high, but most people will be reluctant to think rationally about it, because “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?”
