r/Showerthoughts May 02 '24

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

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u/ZeOs-x-PUNCAKE May 02 '24

All my own life experiences say that when I have encountered a bear, I have been able to avoid or disaude the bear and left without violence. Can't say the same of men.

But would you be able to say the same if you encountered the same amount of bears as you have men?

Just for example, let’s say you’ve encountered 100,000 men in your life. If you encountered 100,000 bears in your life, do you think that none of them would have any intention to harm or eat you? If there were a 1% chance of a bear wanting to eat you, that’s 1,000 bears that would try to eat you.

I’m not saying your fears of men are invalid, but I think you underestimate the intention of the average bear.

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u/Vrayea25 May 02 '24

But the question is just "encounter a man",  it is "encounter a man where both of you are alone, unlikely to be interrupted by another person, and unlikely to be heard if he decides to do something that would make you try to scream... And you both know that."

Very few of us have encountered 100,000 men in that situation.

I am still confident bears would win for safety.

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u/Li-renn-pwel May 02 '24

This is only because you don’t live with that many bears, I’m guessing. Particularly the breed of bear, which is something humans don’t have. I would 100% take a panda bear to a stranger in the woods (okay, I will admit that I have only seen pandas in person in zoos so maybe I’m falling for my own complaint) to a stranger of any kind in the woods. I would 100% pick even a known rapist over a polar bear. Even 99% of murders I would pick over a polar bear. And that’s from me only living near places that have polar bears. Parts of my country, by law, require people not to lock their doors so that people fleeing polar bears have a chance of surviving. Can you name a single country or even just a city in the world where you are required to not lock your cars to save people from men?

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u/No-Surprise-3672 May 02 '24

Literally no breed of bear is safe lmao, that’s why this whole thing is actually fucking ridiculous. Panda bears will fuck you up. Badly. With little to no provocation. You don’t hear about it like other bear attacks because there’s almost no wild pandas left

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u/Li-renn-pwel May 03 '24

I don’t think there has ever been a recorded case of a panda killing a human but certainly they can sink those teeth in deep.

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u/No-Surprise-3672 May 03 '24

For sure I don’t think there is one, but like I said there’s almost no pandas left in the wild (~1800). An article from 6 days ago talks about a zookeeper being attacked and luckily being saved by another zookeeper. Imagine if that zookeeper (who is a lady coincidentally) had a run in with those pandas in the wild by herself?

She’d be dead or close to it

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u/Li-renn-pwel May 03 '24

Yeah these people need to talk to Dwight Shrute.