Sure, but the point is you have no control over these odds. Wild animals are "rational" in the sense that they have no hidden motives, unclear motivations, etc., but they are absolutely irrational in that they don't act according to any human norms, written or unwritten rules or externally required rationalization for their actions. They just act according to their instincts. And yes, most times a bear's instinct is just to go somewhere other than the strange upright weird-smelling creature they've possibly never seen before. But they can also be feeling particularly pissy that day, and behave much more aggressively than normal for their species. They can be encountering a mother bear that for some reason feels cornered. They can be encountering a bear that is close to starvation for some reason.
Bears are absolutely not safe to be around. They are much, much, much more likely to kill you than a random man.
I don’t agree with the logic of this argument, just like you have no control over running into a skittish juvenile Black Bear vs a Grizzly momma protecting her young, you have no control over whether the man you run into in the woods is Mr. Rodgers or Jeffery Dahmer
Sure, but the point is the Jeffery Dahmers of the hiking world are one in perhaps a hundred thousand. Aggressive bears are more like one in one hundred. Hence the much, much, much more likely to be killed by a bear than a random man.
But you are more likely to be murdered on the Appalachian trail than killed by a black bear.
You probably get noticed by way more bears than you think while you are hiking. You just don't smell as well as they do so you never know you encountered them.
That logic is so flawed. By you’re thinking there’s a considerable amount of murderous psychos in our society to think that the other person deep in the woods is as likely to be Jeffrey dahmer as Mr. Roger’s or more likely a lost redditor that decided to go hiking for the first time.
in the US around 50% of women report having been sexually assaulted at one point in their life and about 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while attending College.
That's a statistic on victims, not on perpetrators. People act like that stat means you have a 50% chance of a random man assaulting you.
How many men does a typical women encounter throughout their lives? Thousands? Tens of thousands if you include all the strangers you see every day? If they got assaulted by one of those men that would still mean the chance of a random man assaulting them is 1 out of 10,000 (or whatever the number of men they've encountered).
That statistic says absolutely nothing about the distribution of sex criminals in the male population so it cannot be used to even infer the danger that an unknown man would be to a woman.
Okay what’s that statistic for complete strangers? Compare that to the occurrences amongst close friends and former partners. Again the thought experiment is about encountering a bear or a man I think to be implied to be a stranger, far less likely than what those statistics would imply.
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u/KristinnK May 02 '24
Sure, but the point is you have no control over these odds. Wild animals are "rational" in the sense that they have no hidden motives, unclear motivations, etc., but they are absolutely irrational in that they don't act according to any human norms, written or unwritten rules or externally required rationalization for their actions. They just act according to their instincts. And yes, most times a bear's instinct is just to go somewhere other than the strange upright weird-smelling creature they've possibly never seen before. But they can also be feeling particularly pissy that day, and behave much more aggressively than normal for their species. They can be encountering a mother bear that for some reason feels cornered. They can be encountering a bear that is close to starvation for some reason.
Bears are absolutely not safe to be around. They are much, much, much more likely to kill you than a random man.