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Why haven't you taken the bear pill?
(jlai.lu)
Tap for context
Some woman on the internet said she would feel safer spending a night in the woods with a random bear rather than with a random man
I get the sentiment, but realistically I'll still pick the random man. A man could kill or rape me. A bear is likely to kill me.
Actually a bear is very unlikely to come after you. I come from an extremely rural part of Alberta, Canada, and large bears would sometimes wander in and near town. They wouldn't run around swiping people up and murdering them, they would just basically wander around eating garbage and looking for food. The reality is that if you were in the woods with a random bear, unless it was starving or you were near its Cubs, it likely wouldn't see you as important.
I'll tell you what though. The bodies of indigenous women would get found in the woods sometimes. Bears didn't put them there, men did.
As my wife put it, if the bear kill me, nobody would ask how I was dressed.
Yeah, if I get attacked by a bear the police won't blame, interrogate, and shame me. I won't be looked down on as broken or used.
That's a good point, but I value my life more than my postmortem dignity.
I saw a bear in Canada, it just ran off.
I saw a man there once. Same thing happened.
Unless you are Lady Gaga in a meat dress.
“…for the first time in history, we can blame the attack on how someone was dressed.”
Statistical error. Unlikely to encounter a bear; but per bear encounter, less likely to survive than per men encounter.
Serial killers and rapists are very clever and because there exist serial killers who want to kill indigenous women in the woods, they will likely succeed. Bears have no such desire, and because indigenous women are clever they will avoid the bears.
But I'm willing to bet that the odds of a random man being a rapist/murderer are much lower than a random bear deciding to kill me.
It's hard thing to think about because our brains want to rephrase the situation into taking account how likely it is to encounter men vs bears in the first place. That's why this isn't very applicable to, say, staying safe at night or in bars.
...except it is. This is why, if you have to take a ride home with a strange man, it's much safer to go with an arbitrary man of your choosing than the one who offers.
Actually statistics show that an encounter with a bear is orders of magnitude more dangerous than an encounter with a man. Obviously. I encounter 1000s of men as I was down the street and I'm not dead yet.
Yes, it's very unlikely to run into a bear. But if that's the point you're making, you're missing the predicate of the question where the encounter is already assumed.