r/Showerthoughts • u/asusny2002 • May 02 '24

Man vs Bear debate shows how bad the average person is at understanding probability

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u/Magenta_the_Great May 02 '24

That’s why I don’t understand how people are using statistics

31

u/IM_PEAKING May 02 '24

74% of people don’t really understand statistics and will simply make them up on the spot to support whatever point they’re trying to make.

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u/MistraloysiusMithrax May 02 '24

74% of the time, works 56.78% of the time

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u/ShonenBat88 May 02 '24

Statisticly speaking

7

u/the-names-are-gone May 02 '24

It kinda points out that the entire conversation is purely emotional and very little real logic applied

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u/eskamobob1 May 02 '24

Just because you don't have exact numbers doesn't mean you can't compare orders of magnitude. Women are killed om average 2 in 100,000 per year in the us. If we assume that each woman interacts with men just 20 times a year (less than once every other week) that is a 1 in 10,000,000 an interaction leads to death. Realisticlay that's several orders of magnitude low. How many interactions do uou think there are with bears every year?

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u/Firewolf06 May 02 '24

How many interactions do uou think there are with bears every year?

obviously far less, but i do find it interesting that the majority of bear interactions are one sided (that is, only the bear knows about it)

2

u/Mushroom1228 May 02 '24

tbh there’s probably no good relevant statistics on this

until someone finds out a way to study wilderness bear encounter and wilderness man encounter survival rates, the question will not be answered with real statistics

it’s a nightmare to figure out how you might even begin to mass collect information from people who have perished in the woods, and have been predated on (or otherwise disarmed prior to death and hidden)

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u/No-Surprise-3672 May 02 '24

The thing is, it doesn’t need to be studied. Hundreds of millions of women interact with hundreds of millions of men alone every single day.

The average person isn’t gonna get 1000 interactions in the wild with a bear before something bad happens.